John Woman

1

Lucia Napoli’s family name had been Tartarelli before her great-grandfather migrated from Naples to the Lower East Side. No one was certain how the name got changed. Lucia’s Aunt Maria said it was a drunken Irish customs officer on Ellis Island who mistook their origins for their name. Lucia’s great-uncle Christopher said his father, Alesio, introduced himself as Alesio from Napoli so often that the name stuck.

Lucia didn’t care where Napoli came from. It sounded better than Tartarelli. There were pastries and breasts and something flip in the sound. She liked the way it brought her lips together. “Like a kiss,” she once told her girlfriends after her part-time shift as a filing clerk at Household Insurance Company. The neighborhood girls would go to smoke cigarettes and drink bitter Chinotto sodas at Uno, a little coffee shop on the Lower East Side patronized mostly by young students from NYU and old Italians from the mob.

She met Jimmy at Uno on a Thursday afternoon, “when it was raining so hard it was like God taking a piss on your head. All Jimmy had on was a T-shirt and some jeans and you could see everything, and I mean everything, that boy had,” she said to her twelve-year-old son Cornelius, when he told her that he liked Ginny Winters, the smartest girl in his class.

“You know the first time I seen Jimmy I knew he was the man for me.” She lifted a teacup from the coffee table and used a silver spoon to dump sugar in. One, two, three heaping scoops, then stirring... “His wet hair was hangin’ down on his forehead and he looked at me like I was the only thing in the whole place. You know you can’t argue with a feeling like that.”

“So what did you do, mama?” Cornelius asked pushing his fingertips against his skinny thighs.

They were sitting at the little table Lucia had set up in the bay window of the living room, looking down on Mott Street just below Grand.

“Do?” she asked. “I didn’t do nuthin’, CC, just sat there lookin’ at him and he was takin’ me in too. I waited where I was sittin’ with my girlfriends until he walked up to our table and asked me to go take a walk with him.”

“In the rain?” Cornelius asked, as he had many times before.

“Yeah.” Lucia said, wistfully remembering the wet Jimmy Grimaldi at Uno. “I told him that I didn’t want to get wet and he said that he’d try his best to keep me dry, but that he couldn’t make no promises. My girlfriends told me not to go but I did anyway. He took me down this little passageway at the side of the café and brought me into the alley back there...”

“Then what did you do?” Lucia’s son asked. He was going to stay at her small apartment for the rest of the week, sleeping on the couch, because his father, Herman Jones, was in for a procedure at Marymount Hospital.

“The same thing you been doin’ with that little smart girl in your class. The same thing that all little boys and girls do when they can get away from spying eyes.”

Cornelius hadn’t done anything with Ginny Winters but he knew not to say so to his mother. She didn’t like it when he told her she was wrong. And if she got upset she’d stop telling him about Jimmy Grimaldi and how she came to meet his father.

Cornelius wanted to know what happened and only his mother would be willing to tell him. His father was a good parent but he didn’t talk about what men and women did together. Even if Cornelius could get him to talk about sex it would be very technical, like one of the ten thousand books Herman Jones was always reading.

“Did you kiss him, mama?”

“Oh yes I did. Your father has some very nice qualities but I have never met a man who could kiss like Jimmy Grimaldi.”

“How come?” Cornelius asked.

“He kissed me like he meant it,” Lucia Napoli-Jones said.

She was wearing a short black dress and black hose, sitting at the edge of her chair and gazing out the window. Cornelius thought that she was the most beautiful woman in the world. He felt bad that his parents didn’t live together. His mother was still young and alive while his father had gotten too old to keep up with her. But, CC thought, maybe his mother could stay with them and still have her girlfriends’ night out.

“I love your father, CC,” Lucia would tell her gangly brown son, “but I need to be on my own, to come and go when I want to. Herman only wants to stay around the movie house and read his old books.”

“I love you, mama,” Cornelius would tell her when she complained about his father.

“I love you too, baby,” was her standard reply. “And I always will.”

“So after that day in the rain was Jimmy Grimaldi your boyfriend?” CC asked.

“Oh yeah,” Lucia said with feeling. “You couldn’t’a pried me off’a that boy with a yard-long crowbar.”

CC felt his heart catch at the passion in his mother’s voice.

“I used to climb out my window at night to be with him. There was this apartment building over on Elizabeth Street that had a empty apartment around that time. Jimmy broke off the padlock the landlord had on it and put in his own. Wasn’t no electricity but Jimmy had candles and a mattress. Me and him’d drink wine and then he’d curl my toes for hours.”

“How did he do that, mama?” CC asked, feeling an empty place in the pit of his stomach.

Lucia stared out of the window remembering things her thug boyfriend used to make her do. Her nostrils flared and a flush came to her face.

“It was how he kissed me, baby,” she said.

She sat back in the padded wicker chair, brought her right hand to her throat and sighed.

“That was the best three weeks of my whole life,” she said. “Jimmy Grimaldi was something else.”

CC leaned over and pressed his fingertips against his hard leather shoes. He wanted his toes to curl and his mother to kiss his cheek.

“How come you broke up, mama?”

“What’s that, honey?” Lucia asked.

“How come you didn’t stay his girlfriend if he was so nice?”

“It just wasn’t meant to be, honey. I mean at the end there he was walkin’ me across the floor like I was a lawn mower. He had me eatin’ dirt and likin’ it.” She sighed and looked out of the window again. “But he was just a wannabe TV gangster. Him and his crew would get into fights when we weren’t in his secret crib. And then he messed with Timothy Michaels.”

“Was he your boyfriend from before Jimmy?” CC asked, trying to piece together the names his mother had related over the years.

CC mostly lived with his father — who called him Cornelius. The times he got to stay with his mother were magical because they ate out almost every night and she told him about things that made his body tingle.

“No, my old boyfriend was Albert. When I told Jimmy I couldn’t go with him because I already had a boyfriend he said that he’d go talk to Albert.”

“What did he tell him?”

“I don’t know but the next day Albert said that he thought we should see other people.”

“Then who was Timothy Michael?”

“Michaels,” she corrected. “Timothy was my best friend. He was funny you know.”

“Uh-huh. He told jokes like Uncle Christopher.”

“No. Funny like he didn’t like girls.”

“Oh.”

“Anyway one day Jimmy told Timothy that he didn’t want him to hang out with me and Timothy told him to go fuck himself — excuse my French — then Jimmy and his crew kicked the shit outta Timmy.”

Cornelius tried hard to keep up with what his mother was saying. He put the words and ideas into an order in his head. Fuck was originally a French word and Timmy rhymed with Jimmy. Timmy was kicked so hard that he soiled himself, as Herman Jones would have described it. And all this happened because Timmy didn’t like girls, which was also funny.

“... and when I found out about it,” Lucia continued, “I told that asshole that he could find some other girl who didn’t mind him beatin’ up her friends.”

“Did he get mad?” CC asked, already knowing the answer from another time.

“Sore as strep,” she said. “He kept callin’ me and comin’ to my window at night. At first he said he was sorry. I made up my mind that he had to say it seven times before I’d even consider goin’ back with him. But he only apologized four times before he started gettin’ mean.”

“Did he hit you?” CC asked, feeling fear for his young mother in the streets of Little Italy.

“No but he said he was gonna. That’s why when I was down in the Village and he yelled out my name I ran into the Arbuckle Cinema House over on Second.”

“And that’s where you met dad,” CC said triumphantly.

He sat up in his chair and Lucia leaned over to kiss him.

Whenever she kissed him CC reached out to touch her arm or her knee or some other part of her. And whenever he did that she smiled.

“Not too many people went to the Arbuckle Cinema back then,” Lucia said. “I run in the front and up the stairs to the projectionist’s door. Your father was sittin’ in there with the projector goin’, readin’ a book under a flashlight that he had wired to the wall.

“I said, ‘Help me. A man is chasin’ after me.’ Herman stood right up, pulled out a bookcase that stood against the wall, and it was a secret door just like in one’a those old movies.”

CC knew this part of the story word for word but he didn’t interrupt. He loved to hear how his mild father became a hero that day, the day he was showing Grandma’s Boy starring Harold Lloyd and reading The Third Policeman by Flan O’Brien.

“A beautiful white girl wearing a floral dress with bare shoulders came running into my projection room,” CC’s father had said. “She told me that a man was chasing her so I opened my secret doorway and told her to get in.”

“... and then,” Lucia said, continuing the narrative going on in CC’s mind, “just when the door hit me in the butt I heard Jimmy yellin’, ‘Where is she, man?’

“‘I dunno,’ your father says,” Lucia remembered, but CC knew that his father would never say dunno. Herman Jones spoke only in proper sentences and words. He never used needless contractions and always corrected his son when he misspoke, as Herman called it when people misused apostrophes, real or imagined, to jam words together.

“And when Jimmy said that he knew that I was there,” Lucia continued. “Your father told him to ‘Look around for yourself,’ and Jimmy didn’t know what to say ‘cause the projectionist room was hardly bigger than a janitor’s closet.

“Jimmy still threatened Herman but he didn’t do nuthin’ and finally he left.” CC had asked his father what he would have done if Lucia’s boyfriend found her in the secret closet, or if he just started beating on him.

“I would have protected her,” Mr. Jones said in his proper, acquired accent — a gentle lilt that came from no known country or clime.

“But mama said that Jimmy had big muscles,” CC argued.

“Big muscles are not everything, Cornelius. Sometimes,” Herman said touching his head, “it takes mind,” then touching his chest, “and heart.”

This tableau of his proper black father John Woman would hold as one of his fondest memories.

“After that I begged Herman to let me stay with him,” Lucia went on. “I was afraid that Jimmy would be runnin’ around the neighborhood with his crew lookin’ for me. And Herman said that I could wait with him and at the end of the night he’d take me back to my parents’ house. I told him that maybe he could just take me over to Penn Station because I wanted to get out of town and go see your Uncle Christopher down in Philly.”

“Because grandma and grandpa wouldn’ta liked dad ‘cause he was black?” CC asked, knowing that this was indeed the case.

Lucia was looking out the window again. “Herman showed that film four times and read his book and drank tea. He was so shy that he couldn’t even look at me, much less talk. But I knew that your father liked me and so I made him marry me.”

This was the moment that CC had been waiting for. He wanted to know about Jimmy Grimaldi and kissing but more than that he wanted to hear what his mother did to make Herman marry her. Lucia Napoli was not the kind of woman that CC saw his father marrying. He imagined Herman Jones marrying a plain-looking librarian with thick glasses and sensible shoes. They would sit up late into the night talking about books and politics, newspapers and maybe the difference between humans and other creatures, like mosquitoes and palm trees. The woman his father married would speak proper English and know everything about boring silent films.

Lucia Napoli was a woman of red blood and chocolate cake; she went to live concerts and wore clothes that flashed glimpses of the full length of her legs. CC’s mom laughed out loud, left dirty dishes in the sink and sometimes forgot to close the door when she went to the bathroom.

CC didn’t know how such a man and woman could come together, only why they had to fall apart.

“How did you make him marry you?” little, brown Cornelius Jones asked.

Lucia grinned, her dark eyes sparkling with a devious light. The dark mole on her olive throat seemed to bulge. Her right shoulder rose as if one of her boyfriends was rubbing her neck.

“I kissed him,” she hissed.

“Like this?” CC raised a dirty knuckle to his lips.

“Welllll... yeah, but not really. I kissed the back of his neck when he was readin’ that boring book.”

“Did that tickle him?”

“He didn’t laugh.”

“What did he do?”

“Nuthin’,” Lucia said, curling her upper lip.

“Nothing?”

“Nuthin’. He froze like a little deer come across the big bad wolf. I pushed the book down in his lap and when he tried to lift it up I kissed his neck again and he dropped it. I told him to lie down on the floor so I could massage his back and he did it. But all I did was kiss his neck again and again.”

CC could feel his heart beating. Ginny Winters with her big freckles and ginger bangs came into his mind. He wanted to go to the bathroom but he couldn’t get his legs to stand up.

“Did he like that?” CC asked.

“When I moved away he put his hand back and pushed my head against his neck. The film ran out and he had to jump up to switch projectors because people were yellin’ down in the theater.”

“And then you stopped kissin’ him?” CC asked, oddly relieved.

“No, baby. I kissed his neck the whole time he was changin’ reels. I kissed it all down the sides.”

“And daddy didn’t push you away?”

“He couldn’t.”

“Why not?”

“Because nobody had ever kissed his neck like that and, even though he didn’t know it, that was what he always wanted.”

“How did you know?”

“I know things about men, honey. I know what they want when I see ’em. I knew what Jimmy Grimaldi was after. I knew what your father wanted and I wanted him.”

“Daddy said that after he saved you that you started dating for a long time and then you got engaged.”

“Your father took me home when we left the movie house. We went to his bed and made you that night.”

Cornelius felt like he was floating above his chair. His mother had told him the truth of his beginnings in the world.

“But why did you want to make me and marry daddy, mama?”

“Because no man had ever saved me before,” she said. “No man had ever been so sweet to freeze when I kissed him and so brave to stand up to a bully like Jimmy Grimaldi for a woman he had never met.”

“But then why did you have to leave us, mama?” CC asked. He knew he shouldn’t have. He tried to keep the words down but failed.

Lucia’s warmth drained away in the sunlit front room looking down on Mott. Her smile dried up. Those dark Mediterranean eyes became like twin eclipses, far away and cold.

“I told your father that you would go and see him in the hospital,” she said.

“You said we would both go.”

“I can’t. I have things to do.”

Things to do. These words broke Cornelius’s heart.

Lucia stood up and went into her bedroom. She closed the door and CC knew that she wouldn’t come out again until he was gone from the house.

If only he didn’t have to ask her why she’d left. If only he didn’t need to know every damn thing. That’s what everybody told him — even his father who had read more books than any teacher CC ever had at school.

The boy took his leather satchel from its place behind the sofa. He put the extra T-shirt and notebook in there, then left the apartment being careful not to let the door slam behind him.

2

“Cornelius,” Herman Jones said. “Where is your mother?”

He was too weak to raise his head from the pillows on his hospital bed.

“She got sick,” Cornelius lied. “Stomachache.”

“That is too bad. Tell her I hope she gets better soon,” the elder Jones said. “Mr. Cranston, this is my son.”

A skeletal, yellowish man, propped up in the bed next to his father’s, smiled and said, “Hello, young man. Your father says that you’re a great student in school.”

Cornelius had the urge to ask, Where else would I be a student if not in school? But he knew that his father wouldn’t like him being a smart aleck so he said, “Thanks,” and bowed his head to keep from looking into the wasted white man’s eyes.

Cornelius went to his father’s side and touched his shoulder. Herman was dark brown in color. He was thin like his son with large intelligent eyes and the mildest manners. Cornelius rarely disobeyed his father, not from fear of punishment but because he didn’t want to hurt him.

Herman Jones wasn’t a strong man but that day his voice was so thin his son feared he was dying.

“Everything is all right,” Herman said, reading his son’s eyes. “The doctors say I will be better than ever in a few weeks. It was an obstruction in the small intestine but they yanked it out.”

Using a word like yank was as close as his father would ever come to cursing. Herman revered the English language.

Language is the pinnacle of human achievement, he would often tell his son. And English is the most perfect tongue in the history of the world. Ten thousand years from now they’ll still be using English the way we use Latin today.

“So when are you coming home?” Cornelius asked.

“They tell me about a week or eight days. How is it going at your mother’s house?”

“Good.”

“Are you making her upset or anything like that?”

“No, dad.”

“Because you know your mother is delicate. She acts like the toughest man on the block but inside she has the heart of a butterfly.”

“I know,” Cornelius said. He thought about his mother closing the bedroom door. He knew that if he told his father about it he’d say that was what he meant, that asking her why she couldn’t live with them was insensitive.

“Did you want me to read to you, dad?” Cornelius asked.

“Yes. If Mr. Cranston does not mind.”

“Not at all,” the parchment-skinned white man said. “Probably help me get to sleep.”

So Cornelius got The Life of Greece by Will Durant from his bag. When he started reading from the first chapter Herman closed his eyes and smiled. Cornelius knew that as long as his father was smiling he was still awake.

Fifteen pages later Mr. Cranston was snoring but Herman beamed.

“Dad?”

“Yes, son?”

“Are you really going to be okay?”

“As okay as any mortal man can claim. The doctors say that I should be able to have regular bowel movements now. Just a little rest is all I need. Tell France that I’ll be back on the job three weeks from today.”

“Okay,” Cornelius said. “I better get back to Mom’s. She’ll be worried if I’m late for dinner.”

“She will if you are,” Herman Jones said, correcting both offending contractions.

Cornelius kissed his father’s forehead and touched his lean black hand. Between the kiss and the touch Herman fell asleep.

Cornelius didn’t go back to Mott Street; his welcome there was over. Instead he went to the Arbuckle theater where France Bickman was collecting money for tickets at the door and running back and forth changing reels on the ancient projectors.

“How’s your father, CC?” France asked.

“He’s gotta be in the hospital for another three weeks, Mr. Bickman.”

“I can’t do the projectionist’s job for that long. I make too many mistakes, people come in without buying tickets. And if Mr. Lorraine finds out... He’d fire Herman if he missed three weeks. You know how much he hates your dad.”

“I know,” Cornelius said.

Lorraine had inherited the theater from his uncle, Ferro Lansman. The new owner tried to sell the building to a developer but the city made the place a New York City landmark and blocked the sale. Herman was one of the main witnesses for the landmark committee. He knew the complete history of the property. It had been a silent movie theater since April of 1911; before that it was a Jewish theater.

Chapman Lorraine wanted revenge. That’s why Herman didn’t tell him about the operation; he knew that the theater owner would let him go.

“I can run the projectors,” Cornelius said.

“But what if Lorraine finds you?” France asked.

“He never comes in. And dad always keeps the door to the projection room locked since he met mom. I’ll just stay inside and it’ll be okay.”

Tall and willowy France Bickman was well past seventy. He had worked at the Arbuckle since his retirement from the records department at the New York City Board of Education. France was on duty the afternoon Lucia Napoli ran in to escape Jimmy Grimaldi. When the street thug rushed in after her France had yelled, “Hey you,” but he didn’t stop, and France didn’t call the police because he thought they might interrupt the screening. At the end of the night France drove Herman and Lucia to Herman’s apartment in Williamsburg, in Brooklyn.

Lucia had gone in with him and stayed. Herman broke up with his girlfriend of seven years, Kendra Brooks. Lucia’s parents boycotted the wedding. Lucia sent them a funeral announcement after the ceremony.

Herman’s parents were dead. His sister, Winona, came to the wedding and Lucia’s best friend Timothy Michaels gave her away. France was Herman’s best man. Lucia was pregnant and Jimmy Grimaldi had been jailed because of an anonymous tip about his involvement in a burglary at the beginning of the year. It seemed that he decided to keep one of the rings he’d lifted from the fat banker who had recently bought a condo just north of Little Italy.

That week was a festival of great Russian silent movies. The first one Cornelius showed was Battleship Potemkin — his father’s favorite. CC sat in the small booth imagining his mother kissing Herman’s neck. With the door closed and locked, under the flickering light of the ancient projector, Cornelius felt somehow safe in the presence of the sacred images of his mother’s escape into the arms of his father.

After the fourth film the Arbuckle closed. France went home and Cornelius pulled out the thin mattress Herman kept behind the bookcase door. CC rolled the bed out and curled up under the same suspended flashlight his father had been reading by when Lucia ran in.

Cornelius reread The Painted Bird, imagining himself as that boy running in the wilderness, alone and forgotten among the crazy peoples of a lost world.

3

Four weeks later France Bickman and Cornelius helped Herman up the stairs and into bed, where he spent most of the rest of his life. The doctors didn’t know why he was so weak but they advised the older Jones to consider retirement.

From then on Cornelius went to school during the day and showed films at night.

Only France knew about the labor deceit and he had no reason to tell Lorraine. Lucia came over on the second Tuesday after Herman returned to make dinner and clean up. When she was ready to leave she stuck her head into Herman’s room and said that she’d be back on Friday to cook and clean again.

“Why do you want to come here now that I am sick and confined to my bed?” Herman asked her.

“Because you need my help,” she responded sensibly. Her loose summer dress was awash in the colors of the rainbow. Just to look at Lucia made CC smile.

“I needed your help when my legs worked and my lungs had the capacity for laughter,” he complained. “Why would I need a wife to see me suffer like this?”

“You’re an ungrateful man, Herman Jones,” Lucia told Cornelius’s father.

“Get the hell out of my house,” he replied, shocking both mother and son with his language and rage.

“Why is he so angry with me?” Lucia asked her son the next day. They were having tea at Uno in the break between school and when CC had to go to work.

“Because you left him when he was healthy and in love with you then came back when he’s sick and sad.”

“But isn’t that when he needs me most?” she asked innocently. “When he’s sick and bedridden?”

“I don’t think so, mama. When you’re sick who cares about how clean the house is or if somebody’s in the kitchen making meatballs and pasta? Dad can’t even eat your spicy sauce anymore.”

Though the boy didn’t know it he used language that got through to his mother. She folded in on herself, placing her head on the yellow-and-green Formica tabletop.

After that day Lucia Napoli-Jones worked full-time at Household Insurance. With the extra money she hired Violet Breen as a two day a week housekeeper for Herman and Cornelius.

The heavyset, middle-aged Irish maid and Herman hit it off almost immediately. Among other things Herman had committed to memory thousands of poems, many of them by Irish authors. He recited these to Violet whenever she brought him soup or lingered in his room dusting and tidying.

“He’s a treasure, your father,” she’d tell Cornelius. “And you are as good a son as any man or woman has ever known.”

Cornelius liked Violet. Her short red hair looked like a feather hat and she smelled like soap.

Cornelius’s life fell into a routine that he maintained through high school. Mostly it was school and working the projectors at the Arbuckle. He did his homework while the silent movies played. Late at night he’d read to his father from the works of various historians. Among others, Herman enjoyed what he called the soft historians, like the Durants and Collingwood, who talked about the idea of history being on a par with actual events.

“Nothing ever happens in the past,” Herman was fond of saying, sitting erect among the pillows Cornelius would prop up behind him. “The past is gone and unobtainable. It is more removed from our lives than is God and yet it controls us just as He purports to do.”

Cornelius also read long passages from Herodotus and Thucydides, the Christian Bible and Tacitus. He recited obscure Byzantine translations and Chinese and Egyptian records. The only time father and son really talked was after a reading of some book when Herman would ask Cornelius what he thought about it.

Cornelius began to search the library for other historians to read with his father. He discovered Mabillon and John Foxe’s Book of Martyrs. There was the Italian Muratori and then Gibbon’s magnificent History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire. There were the historian-philosophers from Vico to Herder and Hegel to Marx; Spengler and Toynbee. The slippery Wittgenstein fit Herman’s passion for the lost past — not in his reporting but in his refusal to accept the easy passage of knowledge between cultures, or even individuals.

Much of what Cornelius read he did not understand but Herman would explain now and then. At other times Cornelius would wake up at night suddenly comprehending some quote that he’d read aloud months earlier.

The years passed.

One evening Herman stopped his son in the middle of The Confessions of Saint Augustine and said, “This is the power of the world, boy. The memory of an unattainable paradise where everything is predictable and outwardly controllable. It is all that we are: history, memory. It is what happened, or what we decide on believing has happened. It is yesterday and a million years ago. It is today but still we cannot grasp it.”

“I don’t know what you mean, dad,” Cornelius said. He was sixteen that day but his father, for all his interest in history, did not remember the date. Since he was in his bed almost twenty-four hours a day he had no need for a calendar.

“I mean that the person who controls history controls their fate. The man who can tell you what happened, or did not happen, is lord and master of all he surveys.”

“But if he claims something that isn’t true then he’s master of a lie,” Cornelius reasoned.

Herman smiled and leaned forward. “But,” he said, holding up a lecturing finger, “if everyone believes the lie then he controls a truth that we all assent to. There is no true event, Cornelius, only a series of occurrences open to interpretation.”

Though Cornelius did not know it for many years, this was the moment of the birth of John Woman. Herman neither made a cake nor lit a single candle to celebrate his son’s birth but he gave Cornelius a great and terrible gift that would deliver him into a world simultaneously of my own making and unmaking, as he wrote many years later in a secret journal addressed to the goddess Posterity.

“Are you going to call mom?” Cornelius asked. He’d been waiting for a moment when his father’s mood was open and happy.

Up until that evening no had been his unchanging reply, but on the night of his son’s forgotten birthday, he said, “As you will. Call her. Tell her that she should see the old man before he passes the mantle on to his son.”

Cornelius called his mother that night. When she answered he could hear Dean Martin singing Volare on the record player in the background.

“Hello?”

“Mama?”

“Hi, baby. How is he?”

“He wants to see you.”

“Now?” It was past midnight.

“No,” Cornelius said. “Tomorrow at four.”

When Lucia came into the Jones apartment she was wearing a low-cut, tight-fitting, short black dress without hose or jewelry. Recently having turned thirty-six she still had the beauty of youth. Cornelius was surprised to see the lack of rings and necklaces because Lucia’s new boyfriend, a man named Filo Manetti, had given her many expensive gifts and expected her to wear them. At least that’s what she told Cornelius at one of their afternoon meetings at Uno. Cornelius hadn’t met Manetti. His mother said this was because he was so busy, but Cornelius felt that she was afraid for her boyfriend to see she had a Negro son.

There was only a hint of makeup over her eyes and a touch of blush on her lips. CC’s heart went out to her. He hoped she and Herman would get together, that they would be a family again.

“How do I look, CC?” Lucia asked after kissing his cheek.

He reached out, touching her right biceps.

“You’re getting so tall,” she added.

Cornelius ushered his mother into his father’s small bedroom.

Herman was sitting up in bed against three big pillows. He had on a white dress shirt with a collar too large for his small neck. He didn’t wear pants because his legs were under a blanket.

“Welcome, Lucia. Have a seat.”

Herman nodded at a chair that Cornelius had placed at the foot of the bed. But instead of sitting Lucia went to his side, kissing him twice on the cheek.

“Please sit down,” he said, and her confidence drained away. She went to the chair clasping her small handbag.

“Herman—” she uttered.

“Why have you come here, Lucia?” Herman asked.

Cornelius stood by the door feeling that this question was like the first move in a game of chess.

“To see my husband,” Lucia replied.

“You have seen me. Now, is there anything else?”

“I’m sorry, Herman,” she began. “I know that I haven’t been a good wife. But things were never right between us, you know that.”

Herman gave a quick nod. His lips were protruding slightly. Cornelius had not seen that particular expression before.

“Do you have a boyfriend, Lucia?”

“I didn’t come here to talk about things like that.”

“So you just want me to sit here and listen until you are through? I am not only your cuckold but also your minion?”

Cornelius doubted if his mother knew the proper definition of the word minion but he was sure that she got the meaning of Herman’s words.

“No,” she said.

“Then may I not inquire about my wife’s fidelity?”

“We’ve been broken up ten years, Herman. I’m not even forty.”

“And I am a Methuselah?”

“No,” Lucia said, lowering her head.

Cornelius was witness to his parents’ pain. He could not speak. This was their meeting, their problem to solve.

“If I were with another woman would you want to know?” Herman asked. Lucia’s head hung down even farther than it had at Uno, when Cornelius’s unintended accusation cut so deep.

“I love you, Herman.”

“And who else do you love?”

This question hit Lucia like a slap. Herman’s strategy was picking up momentum.

“How dare you ask me that,” she spat.

“And why not? Here I am relegated to these four walls. The only reason I am not dead is that my son does my job for me. He pays the bills and takes me for a walk around the apartment every morning and night. He reads to me because my eyes are too weak and my hands are too feeble to hold a book. I am only fifty-one, Lucia, and I may not see my next birthday.”

“His name is Filo,” Lucia said, her voice devoid of feeling.

“And is he well endowed?”

“What?”

“Can he satisfy you?”

“Herman—”

“Do you do to him what you did to me on the projection room floor? Do you tell him to perform as you told me?”

On this last word Herman’s voice faltered, his eyes glistened.

“What do you want from me, Herman?” Lucia asked softly.

“I have not been able to have an erection in years,” he answered. “At first I lamented this loss. Then I realized that this was not diminishment but freedom.”

“Freedom from what?” Lucia asked, echoing Cornelius’s thought.

“From you,” Herman said. “Because, you see, I never really loved you, Lucia. It was just that no woman had ever given me such carnal pleasure. I was addicted to my erection inside you, trapped by those cunning kisses you placed on my neck. Those times that you would be gone from my bed then return telling me about how others made love to you. Every word you spoke ignited fire in me. I wanted to kill you but I needed your body more.

“Your whispers about how big they were, how they pressed you against the wall in closed offices at work. I was helpless against my own erection. I could not stop you. I could not stop myself.

“But now that is over. I want to hear about your new lover to see what effect it will have on me. Does he have a big one like that man Mike you bragged about? Does he have a brother as did your Harlem boyfriend? Did he make you eat dirt?”

“I’m sorry,” Lucia whispered.

Cornelius was sure that they had forgotten about him by then. Their pain was a semiopaque sphere surrounding them. It kept him out while drawing every scintilla of his attention.

“I’m sorry,” she said again.

“There is no need, Lucia,” Herman said, almost tenderly. “You are no more culpable than the poppy is for opium. You are the drug and I the addict. Now I am immune to your scent. Go on with your tart’s dress and your bare legs. Destroy some other man.”

After taking a deep breath Lucia stood up and walked from the room, her eyes on the floor. She passed her son without saying a word.

Cornelius stood at the threshold of his father’s room. When Herman realized he was there he said, “Go,” in a pained tone. At the same instant the front door slammed shut.

“I am alone,” CC said to himself, sitting at the kitchen table listening to his father’s sobbing and feeling his mother’s broken heart.

4

Three weeks later Cornelius was on the mattress in the projection room masturbating while the second reel of Oscar Micheaux’s The Homesteader played. He had found a magazine called Dirty Nymphs Crave Big Cocks in a trash can next to the side entrance of the Arbuckle. On the wadded cotton bedding he examined page after page of skinny young men with large erections in various positions of intercourse with equally skinny, large-breasted women. Cornelius writhed against the mattress imagining those women whispering about what the skinny young men had done. The pain was exquisite and his heart thundered.

He had ejaculated six times already and told himself that was enough. But there he was again, lying on the floor with his pants down around his knees, struggling against the thick softness of the single mattress.

“If you stop I’m leaving for the night,” a blond model with two lovers murmured in his imagination.

A moan escaped Cornelius’s lips and then came loud pounding on the door.

“Open the goddamn door!” a familiar voice shouted. “Open up right now!”

Cornelius leaped to his feet, pulling up his pants as he kicked the mattress into the secret closet.

“I said open up!”

Cornelius remembered the voice when a key turned the lock. It was Chapman Lorraine, the owner, the man who hated his father.

The door flew open.

Lorraine was the same height as Cornelius but he was three times the tall youth’s girth and powerfully built. His hands were thick as winter gloves and his shoulders bulged under a blue velvet shirt. Black hair was everywhere on him, protruding from his ears and the neckline of his shirt, threatening to burst forth from the darkening area of his chin and sprouting in the spaces between the knuckles of his fists.

“Where the fuck is Herman?” Lorraine demanded.

He moved close to Cornelius, grabbing the boy’s skinny left wrist.

“S-s-sick.”

“Who’re you?”

“Cornelius. Herman’s son.”

“Do you work for me?”

“I took daddy’s place,” the boy said.

“You go home and tell your father that he’s fired,” Lorraine said. He breathed into Cornelius’s mouth. The breath was rank. The teenager’s left hand went numb.

Then time seemed to stop.

Lorraine was yelling. Cornelius noticed the reel in the projector coming toward the end. He could still feel the erection even though it had gone limp in his pants. Seemingly of its own accord his right hand clutched the heavy lug-wrench that was used to raise and lower the projectors on their metal stems.

Years later John Woman would blame it all on the magazine.

If he hadn’t been in the throes of masturbation when the irate theater owner burst in, CC wouldn’t have felt rage along with being scared. He would have feared the threat of losing the job but this would have been a boy’s fear, not a man’s. Boys submit to the greater power but sexual man responds with violence, the historian wrote in his private electronic journal.

“You... fucking... never... foot...” these errant words made it to Cornelius’s ears. He understood their intentions if not their exact context. He knew he and his father would be out in the street if he lost this job. He knew that the street would kill Herman.

But John Woman’s historical knowledge could not explain away the crime committed that evening... It came in three phases, he wrote to Posterity, each comprised of one blow. The first strike of the lug-wrench was to free my left arm and get the fetid breath from my face. This only stunned the landlord. Lorraine put his hand to his head and then held the fingers before his eyes. When he saw the blood he surged forward. The second blow was to keep the enraged theater owner from attacking. Lorraine fell to his knees after the lug-wrench landed with a sickening thud at the side of his neck. His head hung down, his fists clenched impotently against the floor. If I had stopped there I would have been innocent, having only protected myself from attack. The third, two-handed blow to the top of Lorraine’s head was that step over the line. The man was dazed and of no threat. But I hit him with all my might. The bone gave way. It was a clean and powerful exertion. To this day it feels like the most definite act of my life...

The reel came to its end while Cornelius stood there looking upon the corpse at his feet.

“Change the reel!” someone shouted from the auditorium.

Cornelius rushed to turn on the second projector. This done, he closed the projection room door and locked it.

The wall flashlight illuminated the dead man’s face. His eyes and mouth were open, the prone body in near-fetal position. Next to him lay Dirty Nymphs, a few drops of blood having fallen upon the face of a woman pretending to have an orgasm. The idea of sex made Cornelius sick. He grabbed the magazine and tore it to shreds.

CC stayed locked up with the dead man until the theater was empty and even France Bickman had gone home. Then he went to the office to call his father.

“Hello?” Cornelius wanted to confess to Herman about Chapman Lorraine but hearing that feeble voice stopped him.

“Dad?”

“Yes, son?”

“I’m doing my geometry homework and it’s getting pretty late. I think I’ll stay over at Mom’s.”

“Are you sure she does not mind?”

“No. She said it’s fine.”

“It is fine,” Herman corrected.

“Good night, dad.”

Cornelius called Violet Breen asking her to look in on his father the next couple of days. He slept on the stairs in front of the projection room door, his dreams watched over by Lorraine’s empty stare.

The next morning, with great strain and difficulty, Cornelius rolled the stiffened corpse into the secret closet where his mother hid from Jimmy Grimaldi. Then he went to school, moving from class to class in a daze.

“Is something on your mind?” Mr. Pearl asked the youth in eleventh-grade English.

“No sir,” Cornelius said.

“Then why aren’t you leaving?”

Cornelius saw that all the chairs except his were empty. The bell had rung and everyone left him sitting there thinking about Chapman Lorraine, big breasts and bloody orgasms.

At work he averted his eyes from the bookcase. As the evening moved on he began to plan...

After the show was over CC went downstairs to find France asleep in a small room behind the popcorn stand.

“Hey, France,” the boy said waking the bone-thin septuagenarian. “Did anything happen last night?”

“Not that I know,” France replied.

“I thought I saw some people come in after nine,” Cornelius ventured. “It looked like they might’a sneaked in.”

“Nobody came in. I was at the door till ten at least. You know I only lie down maybe ten minutes before the show’s over.”

Cornelius knew that France went to sleep after the first reel of the last show but he didn’t say anything. He was pretty sure that no one had seen Lorraine come in.

Cornelius slept on the stairs again.

The next morning he went to see his mother. They hadn’t talked for some time. She felt bad about the way Herman had spoken to her so hadn’t come to Uno for their weekly tea.

His mother knew people who had been in prison. Maybe one of them could help him get rid of Lorraine’s body.

“Hi, CC,” Jeremy Brown, Lucia’s upstairs neighbor, said on his way to the front door.

Cornelius had been pushing his mom’s buzzer but she wasn’t answering.

“Hi, Mr. Brown,” Cornelius said. “Have you seen my mother?”

Jeremy, a middle-aged white man with thick dark hair, frowned.

“Didn’t you know that she moved?” he asked.

“Moved where?”

“Said she was going out west. Didn’t say where exactly.”

“When?”

“Two weeks ago,” Brown said. “It was very sudden. I thought maybe that gangster boyfriend of hers was in trouble. She seemed upset.”

Realizing that he was on his own Cornelius went to the library. A newspaper story he’d once read to his father told about a woman who murdered her husband then hid the body in the basement. The victim was discovered forty-five years later, after the woman had remarried, raised three children and died.

There were five articles on the crime in back issues of various papers.

The first husband, Rhymer Tottenham, had been a brute by all accounts. Twice he’d put his wife, Alicia, in the hospital. She never brought charges and defended Rhymer to her friends and family, excusing him with explanations of his frustration and rage. Then one day Rhymer was gone. This wasn’t unusual. He often left home for days at a time spending Alicia’s money on drink and other women. When he didn’t return no one put up a fuss. He was no good and no one missed him.

Each of the newspaper pieces partially explained how Alicia Barstow (the name of her late second husband) committed and got away with her crime.

The cause of death was arsenic, probably from rat poison in his food, the coroner reported. Alicia had been a registered nurse and knew that the smell of putrefaction could be covered up by hydrated lime, or calcium hydroxide. She encased the corpse in three successively larger garment bags and hid it in the basement behind stacks of boxes filled with rocks.

Cornelius bought six differing sizes of thick plastic garment bags and a large aluminum suitcase the size of a steamer trunk. He could do this because he controlled his father’s bank account. He also bought two fifty-pound bags of hydrated lime powder from a construction supply store in Soho. He had these items delivered the next morning before France Bickman came in.

After the Arbuckle closed Cornelius went to work.

From midnight to six the boy toiled. First he wrapped the hideous fetus in the smallest bag, packing chalky lime all around it. Using the handle of the lug-wrench as a lever he rolled the first bag into the second and the second into the third. When the sixth bag was zipped up CC levered Lorraine into the trunk, then glued that shut with epoxy. It took two hours for him to tumble the body back and forth, then maneuver it into the trunk. Then, for the last time, he closed the bookcase door using twenty-seven nails and more glue to ensure that it would never be opened again.

He made it home by eight in the morning. His father was asleep, ignorant of the fact that there was a murderer under his roof.

5

At night Cornelius dreamed about the corpse walled in the projection room closet. In the mornings he woke up thinking about his mother. Her parents didn’t know where she’d gone; neither did Timothy Michaels. Cornelius got Filo Manetti’s number from Michaels but it had been disconnected.

“I do not care where she has gone and neither should you,” Herman told his son. “She does not care about us.”

“But she’s my mom,” Cornelius said. “I love her.”

Herman, who had been looking away, turned to regard his son. His head wobbled a bit because of weakened neck muscles. There was pain behind the ex-sharecropper’s eyes. Pain, ten thousand poems and a million years of history.

“I love you too,” the boy said.

“You are the greatest event in my life,” Herman said. “Greater than my mother’s lullabies and my father’s homemade bamboo fishing poles. You are the blood of my blood and more.”

Cornelius knew this last word held deep meaning. More meant hundreds of hours reading history together; it meant their long talks and CC’s working at the Arbuckle to pay their bills. This one word was meant to repay him for a childhood of sacrifice. His father loved him, loved his being.

Herman was innocent. It was not his weakness that struck down Lorraine. Cornelius was the killer and he alone.

A few days later there was an article in the New York Post about Filo Manetti. He was named on a federal warrant. The government had an informant in the mob who had linked Lucia’s boyfriend to a conspiracy to commit murder. The gangster fled before the police could move in.

Fled, Cornelius thought, with my mother.

At the end of the first week the police came to the Arbuckle. When asked his name Cornelius told the police he was Herman Jones. They wanted to know if he had seen Chapman Lorraine.

“Not for months, officers,” Cornelius said.

Even though he was in the theater office on the lower floor Cornelius thought he caught a whiff of glue from the bookcase-door.

“When was the last time you saw him?” asked the senior detective, Colette Margolis.

“He didn’t like the place very much, ma’am,” Cornelius said. “He couldn’t sell it because it was a landmark building so, you know, he was kinda sour.”

“Did he have problems with anyone?” the detective asked.

“I didn’t really know him,” Cornelius replied.

“What about you?” she asked France Bickman.

“I haven’t seen Chapman in four months. The checks come in the mail and he don’t like the place too much like Herman here says. I really wish I could help you but we hardly know the man.”

The detective had amber eyes. Their beauty struck the teenage killer. Maybe he was staring a little too hard.

“You’re a little young aren’t you?” she asked and Cornelius wondered what she meant. The question must have shown on his face.

“To be working as a projectionist,” she explained.

“Oh. It’s after school and I can do my homework right here. You know all I have to do is change reels. It’s easy.”

She had brown skin like his. Her hair was a wavy brown.

The policewoman smiled. Her partner, a tall Hispanic man, nodded at Cornelius and then touched her shoulder.

“I guess we better be going,” she said. “We might come back if there are any other questions.”

“Come see one of our movies, Detective,” Cornelius offered. “When you watch them it’s like you’re living a hundred years ago.”

“Maybe I will,” she said.

Cornelius wished that the woman would return, but without a badge.

“The thesis is a police investigation,” Herman said when Cornelius told him about the detectives.

“The antithesis is animal attraction.”

Cornelius had decided to tell his father what was going on without telling him about the murder. He worried about the impact this knowledge would have.

“She’s a lot older than I am, dad, but I found myself wanting her to come back,” the boy said.

“But not in her role as a policewoman,” Herman added. “The only question is — what will be the synthesis of the heart’s investigation?”

That discussion was a rare moment of lucidity for Herman at that time.

Often Cornelius would come home to find his father in a confused state; the elder Jones sometimes didn’t know where he was. Cornelius would try to tell him that he was at home in his bed but that wasn’t enough. Herman would have to reenact the journey of his life up to the moment he was there in the room with the young man who called himself his son.

This pilgrimage took many different paths. Herman would, for instance, tell the story of a long and convoluted bus ride from his home in Columbus, Mississippi, through a life of deprivation and joy until the final stop in Brooklyn where he met Kendra Brooks, who later had an operation and became the seductress — Lucia, who made Herman into her man. The wordplay would bring a smile to the old man’s lips. He’d look up and recognize Cornelius sitting there beside him.

Cornelius continued to read to his father. When he was awake Herman loved the stories but rarely gave incisive interpretations of the uses of history. Late at night he’d wake up yelling for the conductor to stop the train.

“Why do you do it?” Herman asked one morning before Cornelius was off to school.

“What, dad?”

“Why do you make me come back to this?”

“You seem lost,” Cornelius explained, “scared.”

“But out there I’m having adventure. I got my legs and a big dick. The girls all like it fine.”

“You don’t want me to remind you that you’re here with me, dad?”

“Just be my friend, France. That’s all I need. Remember that we have to make sure my son has a pot to piss in when the curtain comes down.”

6

Detective Margolis returned to the Arbuckle on a Saturday evening three months after the disappearance of Chapman Lorraine. She came to watch movies. Between films she climbed the slender staircase and knocked on the projector room door.

“Hello, Detective,” Cornelius said.

“You remember me?”

“Detective Margolis. You gave France your card.”

“You can call me Colette,” she said. “I’m not on duty.”

She wore jeans and a short-short-sleeve pink blouse. Her thick hair was tied back. Deftly applied makeup made her amber eyes seem enormous. She was a few inches shorter than Cornelius but well-formed and strong.

“You were right about the movies,” Colette said. “It’s weird how everything in your life seems so far away. You really feel for the characters.”

She wasn’t forty, maybe not much past thirty, but he could see the hardness in her face when she stood close to him.

“You want to watch the next film from up here with me?” He wondered how the question managed to get out around the lump in his throat.

“That’d be great,” she said.

He opened the viewing panel and unfolded a chair for her to sit in. He perched on a stool behind her as she watched The Sheik, starring Rudolph Valentino.

The cop leaned forward, lost in long-ago passion. Cornelius’s fervor was right there in front of him; there in the room where his mother seduced his father, where he’d squandered his seed turning the pages of Dirty Nymphs, where he murdered Chapman Lorraine, where the dead man lay entombed not six feet from them.

After half an hour he put his hands on Colette’s shoulders and squeezed as his mother had him do when she had a headache. He contemplated that move from the moment she sat down. When Colette leaned back he took in a breath so deep that it got stuck. His fingers dug deeper because he couldn’t exhale. Colette hugged the fingers of his right hand by pressing against them with her jawbone. He let out a loud sigh then. This embarrassed him but he kept on kneading the strong flesh.

When the movie was over Cornelius walked Colette out of the projection room. She held out her hand and said, “Thanks.”

After the handclasp she said, “Well... I better be going.”

Four steps down and Cornelius said, “Can we have coffee sometime?” She took three more steps, stopped and turned. Her face was very serious.

“Come down here,” she said.

Something about the command thrilled CC.

He stopped at her stair. She went a step higher, enabling herself to look him in the eye.

“What do you mean?” she asked.

“Ju-just that I’d, I would like to see you again. Maybe talk about the films.” There appeared a hint of a smile on Colette’s pursed lips. Cornelius noticed that she had small scar on her right cheek. There was another along the right side of her lower lip.

“Just coffee?”

“Yeah.”

A smirk came into Colette’s scarred lips, then a smile. “You want my number?”

“If that’s okay.”

“You know I work very hard,” she said. “It took me months just to find time to come here.”

“Anytime would be fine,” Cornelius said.

“What about school? And what would your parents say about you seeing some woman for coffee who was almost twice your age?”

Almost, Cornelius thought.

“My mother is gone,” he said. “My dad is bedridden. I work here to pay our bills. I can do what I want.”

Colette took a white card from her red handbag. Cornelius caught a glimpse of the pistol nestled therein. She scribbled a number on the back.

“The printed side is my work number and the backside is my home,” she said. “Call me and we’ll see.”

The next day he called the home number. When a man’s voice answered he hung up. He redialed and the man, now angry, answered again. Cornelius hung up.

For a week the boy fretted.

The man is probably her boyfriend, he thought. She didn’t wear a wedding ring. Maybe it’s her brother or her roommate. Lots of mom’s relatives sometimes stay with each other.

He called, the man answered. Cornelius hung up.

The next day he got an answering machine.

“We’re not in but you can leave a message,” Colette said. “Either Harry or Colette will get back to you later.”

Cornelius hung up without a word.

We’re not in. The agitated teenager wrote these words down. He thought about her tone of voice and the permanence of the phrase. He called four more times to make sure he heard the message right.

That night he developed a fever. Violet Breen moved in for a few days to care for both father and son.

At night Cornelius could hear the buxom Irishwoman reading Yeats to Herman. He’d drift from the poems into nightmares about the decomposing corpse behind the wall.

France Bickman agreed to do double duty and show the films while the boy recuperated. Cornelius worried that France might remember the secret door and wrench it open with a crowbar. He imagined Chapman’s flesh turning to liquid and leaking out from under the door, then Colette coming in her pink blouse to arrest him. He’d start awake with a gasp hearing “A Dialogue of Self and Soul” rendered in Violet’s gentle brogue.

On Thursday morning the fever broke and Cornelius went to school. He sat quietly in classes, almost as if he wasn’t there. He had no friends among the students and avoided teachers, counselors and coaches with their helping inquiries. He did homework and took exams but Cornelius wasn’t interested in school. He knew there was no future; Herman’s history lessons had taught him that much.

“We all fade into the tapestry of the past,” Herman often said, “becoming like so many tiny knots in the weave of fine Chinese silk. There is nothing to distinguish you, me or even who we might think is a great man. Time passes and we all diminish until the fabric of our age renders unto dust.”

School was just another connective knot of thread, a passing moment.

That evening he went to work. It was the week of the annual Charlie Chaplin festival so the theater was crowded. Cornelius opened the viewing panel and watched, while imagining his fingers kneading Colette’s strong shoulders.

At the beginning of the second reel he ran down to the corner pay phone and entered the number printed on her card.

“Missing persons,” she answered.

“Colette?”

“Who is this?”

“It’s me, um, Herman.”

“Oh. Hi. I was wondering if you were ever going to call me.”

“Yeah,” Cornelius said. There was a siren wailing down the street.

“Where are you?”

“On the street. I got a twenty-minute reel playing.”

“Did you call my house?”

“No.”

“Really? Because somebody’s been calling. My boyfriend thinks I have something going on.”

Boyfriend.

“I got sick,” the boy said. “I had a fever or something.”

“Oh. Are you okay?”

“Yeah. Well I guess I better be going.”

“Why’d you call if you’re just gonna get right off?” There was humor in her tone.

“I just wanted to say hi I guess.”

“What about that coffee?”

“Um, wouldn’t your boyfriend be mad?”

“You’re just a kid, Herman. Why would he be mad?”

“No reason I guess. There’s a place I go to on Second. It’s called Uno.”

“I know it.”

“What about four tomorrow?”

Colette was waiting for him, sitting across from the booth where Cornelius and his mother usually sat. She had on a rose-colored summer dress with quarter-inch straps and a zigzag stitch pattern across the bodice.

Her light brown skin reminded him of the coffee frosting on his father’s favorite doughnuts.

“Hi,” she said, smiling. “I didn’t order for you because I didn’t know what you drink.”

“Mocha cappuccino,” the boy said.

The waiter, Gino, came to the booth.

“Hey, CC,” he greeted. “Long time no see. How’s your mother?”

“She moved to Alaska,” the boy said, feeling like he was under a light as bright as the sun.

“Hello,” Gino greeted Colette.

“Hi,” she replied holding out a hand to the mustachioed elder gentleman. “I’m Colette.”

When Gino went away to order Cornelius’s sweet coffee Colette asked, “Why’d he call you CC?”

“My name isn’t Herman,” the boy confessed. “That’s my father’s name. He’s been sick so I’ve been doing his job. It started before I was sixteen and I kept his name so we wouldn’t lose the paycheck.”

“You work every day?”

“Please don’t tell anybody. If I lose that job we’d be broke.”

“What about Lorraine?” she asked and Cornelius’s fingers went stiff.

“Huh?”

“Won’t he get into trouble if he has an underage boy working there?”

“He knows all about it,” Cornelius said making sure to use the present tense. “And I’m sixteen now. This way he has somebody in there who he doesn’t have to give a raise for at least two years.”

“How many days a week?” the policewoman asked.

“Every day.”

“You never have a day off?”

“Uh-uh.”

“That would put Lorraine in even more trouble.”

“Why?”

“He broke the law having you there before you turned sixteen and then he has you on the job every day.”

“Please don’t tell,” Cornelius begged. “I need the job.”

“Don’t worry.” She sat back in her chair and grinned. “I do missing persons not child abuse.”

“I’m not a child.”

“I know.”

They talked about films after that. Cornelius had become an expert in silent films since taking his father’s job. He talked to her about great Russian films like Father Sergius and Song About the Merchant Kalashnikov. They also discussed little-known Asian works such as The Goddess and The Big Road. From there he started telling her how Europeans always had a better hold on culture because they spoke so many languages and their histories intertwined.

“Americans are so far removed from the actual events in their past,” the teenager said. “They don’t even know the basic lies that make up our history.”

“You sure you’re in high school?” Colette asked him.

“Yeah. Why?”

“You sound like you’re goin’ out for a master’s degree in about two or three subjects.”

“I read a lot.”

“Don’t you go dancing or play football or something?”

“Between school and work and my dad I don’t have very much time,” Cornelius explained.

“But what do you do for fun?”

“Having coffee with you is nice.”

Colette was the first friend Cornelius had since taking his father’s job. When they got together he would talk for almost the whole two hours before they each went off to work. They went to Uno three times before Colette suggested meeting somewhere else. She’d made up her mind not to tell her boyfriend about their friendship because Harry was the jealous type and might try to stop them from meeting. “... And I like seeing you,” she said.

They met on a Thursday in Alphabet City, at the corner of Avenue D and 2nd Street. Colette was carrying a picnic basket.

She led him past a dark green door, up a winding staircase to the fourth floor.

“Where are we going?” he asked.

“Right here,” she said as she worked a key in the lock.

The room smelled musty. There was only a short sofa and an end table. The wood floor was bare except for a small rope rug. A low-watt lamp tilted on the small table. Colette switched the light on after making sure the chain on the door was secure.

“Is this your place?” Cornelius asked.

“No... well, kind of... It’s the precinct’s apartment. Anybody can come here if they want to get away.”

She reached into the basket and brought out two paper cups of coffee.

“Just like the coffee shop but at half the price,” she said. “Sit down.”

Cornelius did as she told him. She sat with her back to him and pushed her thick hair aside.

“I’ve been wanting you to massage my shoulders again ever since that night at the Arbuckle,” she said.

Cornelius went right to work.

“Oh yeah,” she crooned. “That’s what I’ve been needing. Harry tries but he only does it for a minute and he doesn’t know how to grab the muscles like you do.”

Cornelius’s erection was almost instantaneous.

“Have you heard anything about Mr. Lorraine?” she asked.

Now he was fearful and excited at the same time. This brought back the night of the murder in full force.

“N-no.”

“What’s wrong, baby? You nervous?”

“Just concentrating on the massage.”

Colette leaned back against him and said, “Harder.”

He increased the pressure.

“Harder,” she said again.

“I don’t want to hurt you,” Cornelius replied. He was already doing the best he could.

“Do you think that you can hurt me?” she asked.

“Well, I, um.”

“Come on,” she dared, rising to her feet. “See if you can throw me.”

“Uh-uh.”

“No really. Try.”

“I don’t want to.”

“You scared?” Her smile was a challenge.

“No,” Cornelius said. “Well... okay.”

He stood up, held his arms wide then lunged at Colette. She ducked under his left arm, rose grabbing the wrist and tripping his left leg, putting him into an armlock facedown on the floor. Colette twisted around until she could wrap her legs viselike around his middle. This pushed all the air out of CC’s lungs. He thrashed around in fear of suffocation.

“Give?” she said.

Cornelius nodded.

“Say it.”

“I give,” he muttered.

Colette let him go, bouncing to her feet.

“You see?” she told him. “You can’t hurt me.”

“I wasn’t ready,” the boy complained. “I thought we were just playing.”

“You want to try again?”

This time he crouched down managing to grab her around the waist. But Colette twisted to the side, pulling him off-balance. He fell as her scissor-legs wrapped around him. This time she held him for the count of ten before accepting surrender.

“I could get you this time,” he said after catching his breath.

“No,” she said. “You can’t and you wouldn’t want to risk losing.”

“What do you mean I wouldn’t want to risk it?”

“The third win makes me the victor,” she said. “I’d own you.”

Cornelius leaped through the air intent on using surprise and his weight to bring her down. Colette sidestepped his charge and CC went sprawling. She fell on his back, twisted both of his wrists behind him and locked them together with what he suspected were handcuffs. He tried to get up but she grabbed his hair pressing his face to the floor.

“Stay down!” she commanded and he went still.

She reached around the front of his pants, unzipping them and pulling them down. Then he felt his underpants sliding down. Cool air caressed his backside.

“Stop it!” he cried.

She said nothing but he heard a rustling then he felt her bare skin against his. Suddenly her pelvis thrust forward and she bit his ear.

“You’re my boy now aren’t you, CC?” she said mid-thrust. “You’re my boy aren’t you?”

She rolled from side to side on his butt.

“Yes,” he said.

“Really, you’re my woman right now,” she said.

“Yes.”

“Say it.”

“I’m your woman,” he said and she bit into his cheek.

Cornelius started to cry. At first it was just a gentle sobbing because his pride had been hurt.

“That’s it, baby. Cry for me,” she whispered and he blubbered into the dust-caked floor.

“Harder, baby,” she demanded, rhythmically pressing her pelvis against his backside.

Cornelius wept.

There was a dying man back home in bed and the dead man in the closet. His mother was gone and all he wanted was to cry: to holler and yell and kick the floor with his shoes. At one point he bucked Colette off, then went still expecting her, wanting her to mount him again.

“Get up.” She had to help him because of his bonds.

“Lie down on your back on the couch,” she said.

And he did.

“If it doesn’t stay hard I can’t fuck you.” Her skirt was on the floor already. She pulled off her top.

When she descended he felt something so smooth and so right that he actually gasped out loud.

Then they were both moaning, her nails digging into his right shoulder.

He was looking into her eyes when he came. She smiled and he came again. When it was over she kissed his brow.

Later, when they were both dressed, Colette asked him not to tell anyone.

“No,” he managed to say. “I won’t tell.”

7

Cornelius didn’t call Colette again that week or the next.

At night he dreamed about her riding him and biting him. He held his breath remembering how he still had a hard-on even though he was afraid that she might kill him.

“Sex,” his father had said, explaining the birds and the bees when Cornelius was thirteen, “is the prime mover in social and species discourse. It is brutal and primitive and the one true indicator that human beings are animal and not of divine origin. That is why so-called sophisticated members of society deplore the sexual act, because it takes them away from God, pulling them into the realm of the primitive totem.”

Herman never got down to genitals in his oratory.

When Cornelius asked what sex felt like his father replied, “You can pick that up in any smut. Your mother can tell you about that. What I tell you here is the understanding of all things human. From architecture to xenial relations sex is the root, the infrastructure, if you will, not only of human activities but of all life. Once you understand that you will have mastered one of the four pillars of historical thinking.”

But Cornelius wasn’t interested in history after his first sexual encounter. He couldn’t think of anything but the rough-handed Colette. He picked up the phone and dialed her number three or four times a day but hung up before it rang.

He hoped that she would come to the theater and take him out for coffee. He wanted to see her but couldn’t call.

Eighteen days passed. Cornelius was sitting next to his father’s bed reading from the Iliad, a favorite of both father and son.

Homer created fiction that told us more about his era than any historian, Herman was fond of saying. He is the proof of the fallacy of ninety-nine percent of historians and their lies.

Somehow sensing his son’s distress, Herman returned to his former self and stayed — for a while.

“What’s wrong, son?” he asked when Cornelius drifted off from reading.

“There’s a girl I like, dad.”

“Does she like you?”

“I think so.”

“Have you kissed her yet?”

“She bit me.”

Cornelius had not seen his father grin for a very long time.

“She did? How did you like that?” Mr. Jones asked.

“It hurt and I was scared.”

“Because you are used to television kisses and radio songs about what love should be,” Herman said.

“We don’t even have a TV.”

“No we do not. But everybody else does. You cannot escape the preoccupation of an entire culture, son. Cultural content, for better or worse, is like a virus. If everybody else has it then you do too.

“But try not to allow these lies to blind you. Try to see why this girl is biting you. Tell her it hurts and maybe she shouldn’t bite so hard.”

“But that’s weird,” Cornelius said.

“Better to be a weird dog chop than a mass-produced hamburger.”

An hour or so after Herman was asleep the phone rang. Cornelius thought it might be his mother.

“Hello?”

“Is your father asleep?” Colette asked.

“Yes.”

“Then come on over to Manhattan, to the place we went last time.”

“No.”

“If you don’t I’ll come get you.”

Cornelius had no doubt that she knew his address. She had gotten his unlisted phone number.

It was near two a.m. when Cornelius climbed the stairs to the police apartment. Colette stood at the open door, waiting.

“Come on in, CC.”

She was wearing a purple dress that went all the way to the floor. But the straps were thin and the neckline was low. He could see her breasts.

“Take off your clothes and lie down on your stomach on the floor.”

“No.”

“Do you want me to take them off for you?” she asked with not the slightest hint of threat in her tone.

Cornelius took off his clothes but he lay down on the couch.

“I said the floor,” Colette said.

“No.”

She pulled off her dress then and lay down on top of him. She kissed his neck and he sighed.

“I wanted to apologize,” she said. “I didn’t mean for that to happen the other day. It’s just that you got hard when we were wrestling and that made me excited because you’re so damn cute.”

All of this she whispered in his ear; her voice raspy, her breath smelling of liquor.

“I won’t hurt you again, baby,” she said. “Okay?”

Cornelius nodded.

“Will you still be friends with me?”

He nodded again.

“Do you want to cry for me now?”

Cornelius tried to shake his head but a torrent of tears stopped him.

“Give it to me, baby,” Colette crooned, caressing his legs with hers, kissing the back of his neck. “Give it up. Let it out. Cry for me, honey.”

After a while Cornelius turned around wanting to make love to her but she held him off.

She whispered, “After the other day we need some time without it.”

“Okay,” Cornelius said. “But when can we see each other again?”

“Maybe you should be seeing girls your own age.”

“But we could be friends like you said.”

“Friends don’t have to see each other all the time,” Colette argued caressing his fingers.

“I need a friend.”

“Call me,” she said. “You can sleep here if you want and go home in the morning.”

She donned her purple dress and went quickly, leaving Cornelius with a hollow feeling in his chest.

He sat in the dark room, naked and aroused, thinking of how much he was in love with Colette. Her physical warmth, her long nails and teeth, her painful knowledge centered on him.

Herman was right, Cornelius thought, we are animal.

He turned off the light but didn’t fall asleep.

8

In this way Cornelius entered a new tempestuous period of his life.

The next semester he took four morning classes, forging a permission slip from his father. At noon almost every day he took the train to Manhattan to see Colette. They did things to each other which Cornelius had never read about, heard of, or seen in dirty magazines.

Love, his father had said, when Cornelius pressed him on the subject, is peculiar. Real lovers’ acts of passion are repellent to others, not like the pictures you see in those so-called adult magazines.

It wasn’t much but it was enough to tell Cornelius that he was on the right track with his policewoman girlfriend.

At the end of their afternoons of ardor, and often tears, Cornelius would go to work doing push-ups and sit-ups in the projectionist’s booth so that he could outwrestle his powerful lover.

At night he read to his father, though Herman’s acumen had become spotty again.

“Who are you?” he would sometimes ask when Cornelius walked into the bedroom.

“It’s me, dad.”

“Oh. Right. Hello... son.”

At first Cornelius thought that it was his father’s eyesight going. But then Herman began to lose quotes.

“As Hobbes... Hobbes once... oh. It does not matter really. He was a churl old Hobbes. Anyway philosophy is important only for its understanding of history. History is everything.”

He’d strain to recall phrases, which more and more were lost to him. He was nowhere near retirement age but Herman was already an old man.

“All that reading must have burned out my insides, Cornelius,” he said on one lucid day. “All the books I have read swirl around like an ocean, with every page a wave. And now I drift in that vastness buoyed up by slippery knowledge, starving from want of anything with sustenance.”

One afternoon, while Colette was seeing a doctor in Long Island City, Cornelius came home to find France Bickman sitting at Herman’s bedside.

Cornelius fell into the kind of thinking his father had instilled. When following an idea, event, or person in history, the historian always looks for the anomaly. Therein lie the secret moments of history, Herman Jones said. Catching this moment separates the monumental thinker from the mundane.

“Hi, Mr. Bickman,” Cornelius greeted as he did each evening at the Arbuckle.

“Hello there, Cornelius. I just came by to say hello to your pops.” He stood up and shook CC’s hand.

After Bickman had gone Herman said, “He’s a very good man, that France.”

“Does he come by very often, dad?”

“Once a week or so.”

“Once a week? Why didn’t you ever tell me about that?”

“I am still the father, Cornelius. There was no reason to tell you because it is none of your business.”

“I guess not.”

“What are you doing home this early anyway?”

“I got a headache and couldn’t think. I just left.”

“You walked out of class?”

“No. I waited for the passing period and came home. I wanted to get some sleep before I had to go to work.”

Cornelius knew his father would understand the implication. He was doing everything except for the housekeeping done by Violet Breen... Violet Breen... the anomaly.

The following Tuesday Cornelius stayed home feigning a sore throat. When Violet came in at ten o’clock, he was waiting at the door.

“Where is my mother, Violet?” he asked without even a hello.

The hefty Irish immigrant looked down at the floor. Cornelius noticed the lovely turn of her face, something he had not registered before.

“I’m sorry, young Cornelius,” she said. “But I don’t know.”

“How does she pay you?”

“Pay me? She doesn’t.”

“Then why do you still come around?”

Violet looked up into the young historian’s eyes as if pleading for him to understand. And he did understand. This woman from across the ocean had fallen in love with the man whose great-grandfather had been a slave on the Russell Plantation in south Mississippi.

“You do it for free?”

“I do it because my father used to read us children poetry every night before bed. No one has read to me since then and no one would if it weren’t for your dear father.”

Three days later Cornelius came home to find Herman bent and naked, crying on the kitchen floor.

“Dad, what happened?”

“Peanut butter wasn’t in the pantry. Bread wasn’t in the box like it used to be. Fell when I couldn’t find it. Fell.”

Cornelius called 9-1-1. In the back of the EMS van CC held Herman’s hand while the old man cried out in pain from the jostling of his brittle bones.

The doctor who attended Herman after the emergency hip replacement said that men in his state of poor health didn’t usually recover fully.

“He’ll have to be put in a home,” the doctor told him, “a man his age—”

“He’s only fifty-four, Doctor.”

“Oh. He seems so much older.”

“I have to take him home.”

“I’m sorry, young man,” the pear-shaped, bald, middle-aged white man said. “He’s not well enough to release and not sick enough to take up a hospital bed. We are compelled by state law to put him in a nursing facility.”

While they spoke Herman moaned a dirge.

“Herodotus, record me,” he sang. “But will you, can you, tell of my forebears?”

“I have to take him home where he knows his surroundings,” Cornelius said.

“The paperwork will take ten days at least,” the doctor replied. “If he can walk under his own power by then, okay. But I’m sure you’ll see he’s beyond that.”

After the doctor left, Cornelius pulled up a chair to his father’s bed, determined to resurrect his mind.

“Dad.”

“After the alpha comes the theta,” he said. “But not necessarily.”

“Dad, it’s me, Cornelius.”

“It is.”

The boy smiled.

“Dad, you have to get up or they’re going to send you to a nursing home.”

When Herman heard these words his face took on a conspiratorial look.

“I was in the forest pines and spied a man dressed all in black,” he said.

“What man?” Cornelius asked hopefully.

“He did not have a name but he was white and there was hair growing under his chin.”

“He must have had a name. Everybody has a name.”

“No,” Herman said sadly. “He had no name or home or even a past. He was standin’ in the forest lost to the world and to hisself.”

“What happened to him, dad?”

“Who are you?” Herman asked then.

“Cornelius. Your son.”

“That ain’t a real name,” Herman said with a smile. “It’s a vegetable wit’ some silk hangin’ ona end of it.”

Herman giggled.

“What about the man in black?”

“The black man,” Herman corrected.

“You said that it was a white man dressed in black.”

“That’s what they want you to think,” Herman warned. “They want you to think that they is wolves in sheep’s clothin’. But they ain’t. They just Negroes. Niggers.”

“So it wasn’t a white man in the pines that you saw?”

Herman began to cry. His body shook and he grimaced in pain. Tears rolled down his gaunt cheeks.

“Are you scared of the black man in the pines?” Cornelius asked.

Herman could not answer. So Cornelius took out a copy of The Prince and began to read aloud. Within minutes his father was asleep.

Cornelius studied the medical charts at the foot of the bed then went off to work.

Next afternoon, in the apartment with Colette, he defeated her in a wrestling match for the first time, handcuffing her wrists to the foot of the sofa.

He pressed down on her, making love slowly while she struggled and moaned.

Afterward they sat on the couch and talked about Herman.

“I went to see him this morning,” CC said, “before I came here.”

“What about school?”

“Fuck school. They want to put my father in a nursing home.”

“Can they do that without permission?”

“If he’s out of his head and can’t walk. I have to have him on his feet in seven days or they’ll move him to a nursing home and I’ll never get him out.”

“I’ll do whatever you need, baby,” the detective said. “Just leave it up to me and we’ll get your father out of there.”

“How?”

“I don’t know but we will.”

CC took her hand and lowered his head.

“You know I went to the doctor the other day,” she said after a while.

“Uh-huh.”

“It was a fertility doctor. Harry and I are getting married but he has a low sperm count so I had a treatment that will help — you know?”

“You’re getting married?”

“I’m thirty-one, honey. I don’t have that much time.”

“But you could... what about us?”

Colette smiled and caressed his cheek. “You’re just a boy, CC. There’s a whole life out there for you to live. What would it look like me marrying a seventeen-year-old kid? They’d put me in jail for sure.”

A feeling of distance descended on Cornelius. It was as if Colette had been shifted a thousand miles and a thousand years away. He fondly remembered the love they had shared. But she was gone; also his school and job and the corpse he sat next to every evening at work. All in the distance, history.

“I guess,” Cornelius said. “Yeah. I got to go, Colette. My father needs me.”

She touched his arm and asked, “Do you want me to hold you?”

“Not right now.”

“The black man did not see me,” Herman said on the fourth day since the story began. “I followed him deep in the woods. He looked sneaky and me and your mother thought he might be a pimp.”

“But mom couldn’t be in Mississippi, dad,” Cornelius argued. “You didn’t meet her until she came to your projection room running from Jimmy Grimaldi.”

“Oh,” Herman said. “Oh yeah, I mean yes. Yes it was not your mother but my mother. Yes my mother...”

Every day Cornelius discussed and argued about the bearded white man dressed in black, or sometimes the black man, who he was following through the Mississippi pinewoods. He passed the scenes of lynchings and rapes, patches of strawberries and young Abraham Lincoln sitting by a brook. Once he came upon Thucydides. This, Cornelius knew, was a turning point for his father. In the journey through his mind he had come across the historian he loved most. The ancient Greek doctor-general was the signpost of Herman’s sanity.

Along the way child-Herman had gone by a bevy of naked white women dancing in a circle. When the black man (he was a Negro at that moment) moved on the women tried to stop Herman, but he shook them off following the trail of breadcrumbs the man had left to find his own way back home.

Herman ate the breadcrumbs. That’s how he stayed alive: eating breadcrumbs, trailing the white man in black, the black man.

“... yes it was my mother there with me. Your mother was not there. My mother said I should go home and I told her, ‘Later, mama. I got to find out where this man be goin’ to first.’

“And one day, instead of a breadcrumb he tore out a page from a dictionary, leaving that to mark his path. I picked it up and put it in my mouth because I knew paper was made from wood and a man could eat wood if he was hungry enough.”

“So you were following the man and eating pages from his dictionary?” Cornelius asked.

“I almost did,” Herman said. “I almost did but then, before I chewed, I took the page out from my mouth and looked at it. It was all chicken scratches, black marks on yellow paper. But the more I looked, the more it seemed to make sense. They closed all the black schools down around me. They said black folks would do better in the cotton fields and the fruit farms than they would in no classroom. You couldn’t read if you was black. Why read if there was cotton to be pult? Why read when you could slave?”

Herman’s eyes opened wide in amazement. He gazed at the ceiling trying to glean an answer from above.

By day six Cornelius had gotten Herman to sit up as he used to do at home. CC had deciphered the doctor’s scrawls on the medical charts, changing the morphine prescribed to ibuprofen and removing the Ritalin altogether.

He made these changes after the doctor’s rounds.

Every day Cornelius would remind his father where the story had left off. At first Herman claimed not to remember but Cornelius kept asking and after a while he’d have Herman back on the trail of the quarry in black.

“... the pages was from a dictionary at first but then they was from novels and history books and biographies. I strained so hard to understand. Some people along the way give me hints. There was a white woman on the other side of a river he crossed who told me what a ‘Q’ was. She told me that there was no ‘Q’ word that didn’t have a ‘U’ as the second letter. She was wrong but that didn’t matter because she was mostly right....”

“Why were you following that man, dad?”

“To find my way back home,” he said.

“But you were with your mother. Didn’t she know the way home?”

“Not home to Mississippi, ninny. I wanted to come home to you.”

“Who am I?”

“My son... Cornelius.”

And he was back in the world they both inhabited.

“We have to get you out of here, dad. They want to put you into a nursing home.”

“What do we do about it, son?”

Wednesday afternoon at three p.m. Herman Jones, using two bamboo canes, walked toward the nurses’ desk on the third floor of St. Francis Hospital in Brooklyn. Cornelius was by his side. The elder Jones was wearing blue jeans, a red T-shirt and hospital-supplied paper slippers. The day before they had practiced their trek. It was difficult at first but Herman was resolute and so was his son.

“Where you think you goin’?” a big black nurse with blond hair asked.

She rose up from behind the nurses’ station.

“Home,” Cornelius said.

“I don’t have authorization to discharge this patient. Come on now, Mr. Jones, let me take you back to your room.”

“No, Nurse, I am not going back there.”

“But Mr.—”

“Please,” Herman said. “I do not wish to be transferred to some nursing facility. I can move under my own power and I have the wherewithal to address your inquiries. That accepted, there is no reason for you to hinder my egress from this, this medical prison.”

“The doctor has to release you, Mr. Jones.”

“What is your name?” Herman asked the nurse.

“Jackie.”

“Jackie what?”

“Boughman.”

“Well, Ms. Boughman,” Herman said. “I take it you are a black woman in spite of your hair.”

“Yeah.”

“Being of our race you must be aware of the end of slavery in the United States. And so you must understand why I elect to leave these premises under my own power.”

Cornelius had never been more proud of his father. He knew how hard it was for him just to stand after being in bed for so long and with a new hip aching in its joint. But Herman was eloquent and dignified.

“I’m sorry, Mr. Jones, but I will have to wait for the doctor’s release form.”

“Excuse me,” a voice said then.

All three heads turned to see a caramel-colored woman who had approached unnoticed.

Only Cornelius recognized Colette Margolis.

“Yes?” Nurse Boughman said.

“I’m a family friend,” Colette said, flipping open her wallet to reveal the shiny detective’s badge. “I’ve come to help Mr. Jones home.”

“I’m sorry but you’ll have to wait for the doctor,” the nurse repeated.

“No I don’t,” Colette asserted. “We’re leaving now. If you try to physically hinder me I am authorized to use force.”

“Even if you do not remember slavery I wager you understand that,” Herman said.

They took the elevator down and walked out to the street. There Colette’s lime green Honda was waiting for them. They helped Herman into the front seat.

9

“Who was that woman?” Herman asked Cornelius once he was back in his own bed.

“Just a friend.”

Cornelius had walked Colette to the door, where she kissed him then looked into his eyes as if maybe he was someone new.

“Where did you meet her?”

“Um,” the boy mumbled, “at the Arbuckle.”

“Is she one of the detectives investigating the disappearance of Chapman Lorraine? They suspect he’s been murdered.”

“How did you know about that?”

“France told me. About a month ago the police called him down to their offices. They told him that the last thing Chapman intended to do before his disappearance was come to the Arbuckle. He was such an awful human being, but still no man deserves to be plucked from his life.”

“Yeah,” Cornelius said heavily, feeling his father’s indictment. “I’m sorry France told you about it.”

“Why?”

“I don’t want you to worry.”

“Worry? Me? You can tell me anything, boy. I am your father not your ward. But answer my question, why would the police help me?”

“The detective questioned me too. She figured out about you and when I told her about your, um, predicament, she just offered to help.”

“That was very kind,” Herman said, looking his son in the eye.

“Dad?”

“Yes, son?”

“You seem... I mean for the past few months, before you fell, you were forgetting things.”

“That is true, Cornelius. Ideas had begun to fade. It was hard for me to focus. At first I thought it was our long talks that brought me back to awareness. But there must have been some medicine or nutrient they gave me that rejuvenated my mind.” Upon saying this Herman went into a fit of coughing. It was a rolling, raspy, wet cough that went on and on.

“How are you feeling, dad?” Cornelius asked when his father lay back panting from the effort.

“Not too well. My hip aches and it makes me sweat just to lay here. But I have my mind.”

Cornelius pulled up a chair and touched his father’s hand.

“There is no hiding from it,” the elder Jones said. “You saved me from indignity but the grim reaper will not be denied.”

Herman’s lower eyelids sagged open as if some preternatural gravity was dragging him down.

“Do you want me to read to you, dad?”

“No. You have taken care of me all these years when it was my job to look out for you. You read to me and prepared thousands of dinners. I have failed you.”

“But, dad, you showed me Hannibal and the empire of Kush, the Shang Dynasty and the Inquisition. You taught me how to think.”

Herman Jones smiled at his son.

“Your mother and I failed you but you never disappointed us,” he said. “You have been a good son.”

“I love you, dad. I want you to live.”

“I have to sleep for a while, Cornelius. When I wake up I will do something for you.”

He closed his eyes and was immediately asleep.

Cornelius sat there looking at Herman’s hands. They were old, intelligent hands that reminded the boy of a da Vinci drawing he had once seen in a book. The phone rang many times over the night. It went unanswered.

The night was cold. The steam heat for the building wasn’t yet turned on. The lights were out except for one bulb in the kitchen, two rooms away. This faint radiance filtered through the darkness of CC’s mind. It was like a far-off hope. He couldn’t tell then if it was fading away or beckoning a new day.

Just after eleven CC realized he hadn’t gone to work that night. Maybe the phone calls had been from France Bickman.

Around one a.m. he accepted that his father would soon die and that Lucia Napoli was gone for good; these thoughts made him shiver so he climbed under the covers with his father.

When he opened his eyes the room was filled with light. His head was nestled against his father’s side. Herman was looking down on him. Cornelius held his breath so as not to break the spell.

“Wake up, sleepyhead,” Herman said.

Cornelius was a child again with parents who showered love on him every morning.

“Hi, dad. I’m sorry about getting in your bed but it was cold and I didn’t want to leave you alone.”

“I was not going to die last night,” Herman Jones said. “I have a promise to keep.”

“What is it?”

“Not really one thing but three. Some knowledge, some advice and then another thing.”

“Can I go to the bathroom before you explain?”

“You may.”

He remembered that one urination the rest of his years: bare feet on the cracked tiles, corroded copper pipes poking out through the plaster behind the tank, the exultation of release, and the memory of physical closeness with his father. There was salsa music playing somewhere and the sharp smell of tomatoes cooking. A huge fly buzzed in between the screen and the window and there was a rumble in the ground, far away. The J train Cornelius thought and he laughed to himself, I’ve been too busy to notice it. When he got back to the bedroom Herman was wearing his reading glasses, turning the pages of a book.

“Hello, son,” he said in a full, strong voice. “Come sit and talk.”

Cornelius pulled up a chair.

“I promised I would do something and I mean to accomplish that end.”

“What’s that, dad?”

“First I will explain the remaining three pillars of historical inquiry, then I shall give you some personal advice, and sometime later, after I pass on, I will help you along on your journey.”

Cornelius was a child again.

“The pillars,” Herman explained, “are quite simple. The first, as I told you some time ago, is sex. We need not spend any more time on that subject. The next two mainstays are inextricably intertwined. These are technology and economics, both entities secretly conspiring to inform the relations of humans to their world. Lewis Mumford and Jacques Ellul speak to the phenomenon of technology and its bastard son — technique. Marx is as good an example as any of how economics rears its head in every room in the house of man...”

A decade later the boy could recite this lecture word for word.

“... The fourth pillar is the simplest and by far the most important. You need not understand sex, money or machines to know history but you must comprehend the shopping list.”

“Shopping list?” Cornelius drew his head back like a baby snake.

“There is little verifiable evidence in the courtroom of history,” Herman said.

Cornelius noticed beads of sweat standing out on his father’s forehead.

“... You cannot be certain what Lee was thinking when surrendering to Grant or if Napoleon loved his wife. We do not know why primitive Europeans danced about the maypole, not really. Why did Alexander turn his back on India? Was Saint Francis really the deliverer of Ireland? We are given history’s stories but they are open to broad interpretation. Human motivation is arbitrary. Most human records are based on lies, misbegotten loyalties and misinterpretation.

“But the shopping list... three potatoes, a flint knife, a bag of seed and a jewel of red coral... these are things we can believe in. From these items we can extrapolate historical events, stimuli... needs. Through lists of larder we can enter the lives of those who have gone before.”

A quick rivulet of sweat ran around the dying man’s left eye.

“You better lay back and rest, dad.”

“No time for resting, Cornelius. I have to finish before the curtain comes down.”

“You’re not going to die today, dad.”

“Maybe not but I will finish the greater part of my gift to you this day. That long journey we took through the Mississippi pinewoods was me looking for the strength to die. Rather than Death stalking me I was after him. I was looking for the courage to meet him face-to-face. That is being a man.”

Herman was breathing harder than before. A drop of sweat fell from his chin.

“But that is not what I wanted to tell you, Cornelius. I need you to know something.”

“What’s that, dad?”

“Most children have it pretty easy. Rich or poor they have a mother, maybe a father, and food to eat. They sleep at night and play in the sunlight. They believe in fantastic things and read books or watch movies about cowboys and nurses. They play at adulthood through fighting and through love. They break the heart of anyone who loves them and never care a whit.

“But not you, Cornelius. You have stood by me and your mother too. You turned your back on childhood and we took your magnificent gifts. I have not thanked you enough. I gave you a good education. I would wager that you are one of the best-educated children your age in the entire world. Who else has read Plato and Aristotle, Vico and Confucius?

“You are well taught but you paid for that education with your springtime. So now, here today, I release you. Live your life, Cornelius. Go out in the world and love women and drink deeply, pray to God if you so desire or worship the body and the mind, which I believe you will find are basically the same.

“I release you, Cornelius Jones, from the servitude of your childhood. You owe me nothing but to be happy and well. Feel no guilt, for the past does not exist and therefore cannot pass judgment.

“Take my books if you want them. Burn them if they offend you. Go to school or work on an oil rig. I do not care. Not because of a lack of love but because my love for you could never be greater. I confer upon you the greatest gift: freedom from the chains of your blood.”

Cornelius was moved by his father’s amnesty. He felt that Herman knew about Chapman Lorraine and offered absolution.

Freeing the fledgling from the confines of the nest, John Woman reflected years later. But still the chick wondered if he could fly.

10

The next morning Herman was crying in his bed.

“I hurt.”

“Where, dad?”

“Everywhere.”

Cornelius sat with him until Violet came. He wrote her a check for three hundred dollars asking her to spend a little time each day with Herman.

“You don’t have to clean,” Cornelius said, “just sit with him and give him water if he gets thirsty.”

The doctor who came the next morning was Violet’s niece’s husband. He was a short, dark-haired Frenchman come to America to live with relatives while he studied heart medicine in Chicago. There he met Stella Breen, a mother’s girl who always meant to come home.

“He’s very sick,” Dr. Artaud said. “But I see no reason to put him in the hospital. They’d only send him off to a nursing home. Keep him comfortable and give him the medicine I prescribe. He won’t live very long.”

The doctor was sad to see the effect his words had on Cornelius. At that time the boy still believed in the authority of professionals. He thought that there was some injection that might get his father sitting up and talking about the newly released book of slave narratives.

“What’s wrong with him?” CC asked.

“It’s his heart.”

“But why didn’t they say that at the hospital?”

“Sometimes,” Dr. Artaud said, “American doctors ignore the signs of the poor.”

Violet slumped into the stuffed chair and cried at the pronouncement.

They had sixteen thousand dollars in the bank and a few savings bonds in a safe-deposit box that his father kept. The first batch of drugs cost eight hundred and forty-seven dollars. Cornelius handed over the money without hesitation. He gave Violet a thousand dollars to keep coming over the next month, especially to be there in the evenings when he had to go to work.

That was Tuesday.

On Wednesday Herman rallied. He sat up and talked with his son about the history of thought.

“Thought and language are like breathing in and breathing out. They are inseparable and at the same time opposites. Together the two make up the mental image of possibilities in the material world. The closer they come to bringing this reality in line with our experience the more true our expressions of mind.”

“So,” Cornelius asked, “the advance of the history of thought is more like a science because it gets better all the time?”

“No,” Herman said sadly. “Our use of thought and language has deteriorated over millennia. The Greeks saw the world more clearly than do we. The Aborigines of Australia saw themselves as part of a magnificent deified universe of which they were but a small part, while western man sees only a toy-box that was set there for him by some shadow being that has already forgotten humanity.”

Every truth the old man sought ended in unconsciousness or death.

The next day Herman called for Cornelius and asked him to please turn on the lights. When Cornelius told him that the lights were already on he said, “Then the darkness is in my eyes.”

The next day he began to shout about men crossing the river.

“There’s no one there, dad,” Cornelius said to him.

“I see them coming. I see them.”

His blind eyes were wide with fear, his fingers jabbing the air.

“Over there! Over there!”

By Saturday the autodidact from the Mississippi Delta could only murmur his fears.

“Oh no,” he’d cry from time to time, his arms moving about weakly, his flailing hands slowing now and then to fold tissues into tiny squares.

On Sunday Cornelius awoke to the sound of his father’s labored breath. He came into the room to see Herman lying on his back, gasping for air. His eyes were wide, his mouth gaping.

Cornelius took the elegant hand and it gripped him like a vise.

With all of his being Cornelius concentrated on his father. The already slender Herman had lost twenty pounds. Cornelius could see the skull under the papery flesh of his father’s face. He smelled of dead skin.

Father and son held on to each other until suddenly Herman hiccupped and stopped breathing. It took a few moments for Cornelius to realize what had happened. The room was absolutely silent. There was no salsa music playing, no rumble in the ground.

The young man held his dead father’s hand and counted his own heartbeats, each pulse taking him that much farther away from his sire.

He couldn’t cry, wasn’t really sad. It was just that he could not imagine a world without Herman Jones.

Violet came into the room at four that afternoon.

“Oh my God he’s dead,” she said from the doorway.

Cornelius looked up at her and said, “Leave us alone please, Miss Breen. I’ll make the calls later.”

Over the next three days he didn’t answer the phone or knocking at the door. He didn’t eat or cry. He spent most of his time at his father’s side, holding the stiff dead hand.

When the police entered the room, after getting the landlord to let them in, they found Cornelius reading aloud from Herodotus.

“What do you want?” he asked the officers.

“You have to come with us, Mr. Jones,” one of them said.

He remembered thinking that this was the first time anyone had called him mister.

He was kept in a holding cell in the precinct where they brought him. Colette came to visit twice a day.

“They have to investigate the death because your father wasn’t that old and because you kept the body so long,” she’d said. “They’re supposed to put you in juvenile detention but I asked for protective custody — this is much better.”

“I see,” Cornelius said. “Thank you.”

“Can I do anything for you?”

“I’d like some books.”

“What kind of books?”

“History.”

On the day of his release Colette was there.

“What did they say?” Cornelius asked.

“Your father had serious heart disease. That’s what killed him. Was he being treated for something like that?”

“Only by Violet’s nephew-in-law. But by then it was too late,” he said. “Maybe if somebody in the hospital had told us we could have taken him to a heart specialist. We could have given him heart medicine. But I guess it wasn’t meant to be. I guess he was always going to die like that.”

“I told them that you were gainfully employed and that you supported the household so they’re letting you go back home,” Colette said.

She drove him in her Honda. When they parked in front of his building she touched his shoulder.

“Harry and I are getting married in the spring,” she said. “I’m pregnant with his child.”

Again Cornelius’s eyes played that trick on him. Colette seemed very far away. He felt that to talk to her he would have to shout and so he didn’t say anything. He just nodded and opened the door.

“I still want to see you, CC,” she said.

He nodded again, climbed out, then walked into the building without looking back.

11

He spent six thousand of the remaining fourteen thousand dollars on the funeral, which was held at the Baxter Chapel on Flatbush Avenue. The police released the body to Baxter’s and Cornelius didn’t want to move his father around any more than necessary.

“Bringing a man to his final resting place is a delicate dance,” Herman had once said. “The men carry him down but it is the women dancing who make sure his passage is a gentle one.”

There were no dancers at Herman’s end, no minister because even though Herman believed in a deified universe he had no truck with organized religion. There were obituaries posted in the Daily News and the New York Times. The coffin was pine for the sake of Herman’s Mississippi roots. Collingwood’s Idea of History was nestled under his right arm. The mourners numbered three: France Bickman, Violet Breen and Cornelius, but four chairs were set out at the younger Jones’s request.

The service was set to start at ten. They had fifty minutes to say their last good-byes. The three mourners, all of whom had arrived early, stood by the open coffin and communed with Herman’s clay.

Cornelius had decided to dress him in a torn white T-shirt and a pair of faded blue jeans that he’d found in the bottom drawer of Herman’s bureau. Both items were very, very old. They were folded into a brown paper bag that had Greenwood, 1957 scrawled on the side. The mortician’s makeup captured the faded character in his face.

The two passions of mankind are the ecstasy of childbirth and the inescapable tragedy of death, Herman had often said. Without these elements human beings would be no more than automatons wandering blindly through a world of wonders.

“We should get started, CC,” France said.

The two men went to their chairs. Cornelius looked at the empty seat on the far left, then at the door in back of the small chapel. When he turned to look at the coffin Violet was standing there attempting to master her grief.

Short with sturdy legs, wearing a dark blue dress and a black shawl over her shoulders, she wore no makeup. Her hair was wrapped in a dark green fishnet of some sort. Violet’s eyes filled with tears as she opened her mouth to speak, then closed it again to swallow. She repeated the attempt seven or eight times. Cornelius thought that this alone was proper tribute to his father.

The cleaning woman stared at Cornelius gathering her strength.

“Herman Jones was a learn-ed man,” she said. “Weak of body but strong in his mind. He had no formal education, which would hinder most people, but Herman loved knowledge, collected it. Even though he was smart and well-read that is not why I will miss him. He was a most generous man. Not like some moneybags who gives his tithe to charity, but like a river that flows through a country village. All you had to do was come on down and he would take you on a journey, clean off the dirt or feed you if you were hungry. There was more life in that little man than in most children.”

Cornelius sat forward. He was surprised by the poetry in Violet, who he had known only as a cleaning woman and his father’s willing audience.

“... But his generosity is not why I will miss him either. What he gave he gave freely and so it had nothing to do with debt or sorrow. The reason I’m here is to say that Herman Jones was the only man I truly loved. A black man confined to a bed who never once spoke angry or coarse words in my presence, who recited poetry because we both loved it and who asked each morning about my family and my health.” Violet broke down crying and France hurried to help her to her chair.

After helping Violet, Bickman went to stand before the pine box.

He began talking, CC noticed, without ceremony or dramatic tones.

“Herman taught me forgiveness and humility. He showed me through conversation and by example that my college degree was worth less than a Sunday ticket to the Arbuckle. And if I could give up some of my eighty-two years to have him back here today I would do it without a moment’s hesitation.”

“Oh,” Violet said.

His hands clenched into fists, France Bickman returned to his seat.

Cornelius glanced at the empty chair. When France put a hand on his shoulder he stood up and stumbled. The only reason he didn’t fall was that France steadied him. He experienced a powerful connection with the old man in the soft gray suit. Then Cornelius took the five steps to his father’s coffin.

“When I was in the jailhouse,” he began, “I didn’t have any books at first, so I followed my father’s example and considered the road that brought me to my present location. Dad was always telling me things like that. When I was little I’d get impatient with him but he never seemed to mind. And when I got older I didn’t believe that I could ever be as smart as he was, or as kind. He made me the man he could never be and then set me free to be that man.

“I was there in the jailhouse, in Brooklyn, thinking about sitting next to my dad’s body. Somewhere in my mind I knew that I should have called somebody, done something. But I couldn’t leave his side. My father was dead. The world was going on outside and if I left I would be abandoning him, the only person in the world that mattered to me — except my mother... who hasn’t made it here today.

“Then the police came and they took me into custody.”

Violet started crying again. France lowered his head.

“I owe my father everything. Even when he was on his back, weak as a baby, delirious from the heart disease that the doctors never saw — he was the man I turned to for strength. Good-bye, dad. I will never willingly leave you.”

They took a limo to the graveyard and threw clods of dirt onto the lowered coffin. Cornelius wondered if his mother had seen the notices or if someone from her family had seen them and passed the information on. The day was bright and the air cold. He had on a brown sports jacket and black trousers, clothes that had belonged to his father. He was shivering but did not register the cold.

He missed his mother as much as he did his father.

But even then The Plan was hatching in his mind.

When the burial was over the small group walked back to the limousine. An unfamiliar white man was waiting there. He wore olive work pants and a plaid shirt. He was middle-aged and obviously feeling awkward. When the mourners got to the car he approached them.

Up close Cornelius could see that the man was brawny and broad. He had a bulging stomach and thick brown-and-gray hair.

“Cornelius,” Violet said, “this is my husband, John.”

A smile came immediately to Cornelius’s lips. His shoulders and spirits both rose.

What a wonderful good-bye gift, he wrote to Posterity years later. My father not only had a woman who loved him but he stole her away from a big strong Irishman.

“Pleased to meet you, Mr. Breen.”

“O’Connel,” Violet said. “That’s my married name.”

Cornelius’s smile turned into a grin. “You have an exceptional wife, sir,” he said. “She made my father’s last days tolerable.”

Cornelius’s friendliness put the dour man further off balance. He nodded, mumbling his thanks, then shaking the teenager’s hand.

“Sorry for your loss,” he said.

“Thank you. Thank you very much.”

The limo dropped Cornelius and France off at the Arbuckle. There was a handwritten note on the front door saying that it would be closed in deference to the death of the projectionist.

France took Cornelius to the office behind the tiny concession stand. There he kept supplies for popcorn sales and the accounting ledgers.

“Sit,” France Bickman said, “sit, sit, sit.”

Cornelius experienced an unexpected feeling of calm. Years later he understood this peacefulness as an easement into freedom.

France sat down on the other side of the walnut dining table used as the desk for the tiny office. There were debit and credit ledgers, silent film catalogs and piles of letters from theater fans stacked up on both ends. France sat back taking Cornelius in with faded gray eyes. Bickman had never looked his age. There were few wrinkles on his spare face and he moved easily without stiffness, hesitations, or trouble bending over to pluck pennies from the floor. He’d always looked younger than Herman.

“I’ve known you my whole life, Mr. Bickman.”

“France,” the ticket-taker replied.

Bickman brought out a bottle and two plastic glasses from a wooden cabinet behind him. It was Wild Turkey, about halfway filled. He poured them both shots and Cornelius drank his down. The whiskey clutched at his throat but he kept it from coming up, then he held out his glass for more.

France obliged.

“Your father was a wonderful man, CC.”

The boy nodded and chugged down the second drink.

While he was refilling the glass France said, “He wasn’t only my friend and mentor... he also saved my ass.”

“How’s that, Mr., um, France?”

“My three girls turned college-age while my wife was dying. Matilda’s cancer ate up our savings. When she was gone I had to come to work here because I didn’t have enough money to keep up the payments on the loans for tuition. That’s when I got the bright idea to skim money off of the ticket sales to help keep me from going down the toilet. I didn’t know that part of the checks and balances that the original owners put in place was that the projectionist would count heads every night. It wasn’t an exact number but close enough for your dad to tell that I was guilty as hell.

“One night after closing Herman told me he knew I was a thief. He had my butt in a sling; could have sent me and my daughters to hell. But after I explained my predicament he said that he would do the same thing if he had a child that needed to be looked after.”

“So he let you get away with it?” Cornelius felt a tingling numbness in his lips as he spoke.

“For all these years. I was over fifty thousand dollars in debt for my wife’s medical bills and college was two hundred thousand — more. But what I didn’t tell Herman was that, after he let me go, for every dollar I took I set one aside for him.”

“You did?” Cornelius said, sipping his whiskey. “Did you ever tell him?”

“When he and your mother broke up I told him. He accepted it because he wanted you to have a good start in the world after he was gone.”

“So how much is it, Mr. Bickman?” Cornelius heard himself ask. The whiskey had split him into two distinct people: the one who said things and the other who listened. France swiveled around in his chair and pulled out a small brown leather suitcase that he set on the table between them. He slid the case across the table and gestured for Cornelius to open it up.

There were neat stacks of used bills inside. Mostly tens and twenties in small packs held together by knotted string.

“One hundred and seventy-three thousand dollars,” France said. “All of it in three cases like this one. The other two are in the closet there behind you. There’s a false door back there. Nobody knows about it but me.”

Cornelius’s mind went to the dead man in the closet above them. He wondered if every building in New York held as many hidden crimes as did the Arbuckle.

“And it’s all mine?” he asked.

“Yes sir. You bet. This is my debt to your father. He risked his own freedom for my daughters’ lives. The least I can do is pay it back a little.”

“That must have been what he meant by my gift,” CC heard himself say. “He said that after he was gone he was going to give me something to help me on my way.”

France Bickman nodded.

After they finished the bottle France left. Cornelius told him he’d lock up before going home, but the boy didn’t leave the Arbuckle that night.

He walked down the center aisle of the theater looking at the worn leather seats and threadbare carpeting. The nylon screen had been sewn in half a dozen places and was in serious need of a cleaning. The light fixtures above the projection room hadn’t been dusted in a dozen years.

Cornelius went to the projection room and queued up a Buster Keaton film that the theater owned, The General. Then he went down to the front row to watch. He hadn’t sat in the auditorium since before Herman’s intestinal operation. When the film was over he played a compilation of Buster Keaton shorts.

Sometime in the middle of the night Cornelius awoke from a dream about somebody crying. He was sprawled out there on the carpet in front of the wide, bright, blank screen.

12

Cornelius couldn’t imagine sleeping under the roof where his father died, so instead he moved into a cheap motel called The Starlight. The Arbuckle had a deal there for out-of-town visitors who came in for the few festivals the theater hosted.

CC spent the next week reading death notices from his birth year. The Summers family — mother, father and newborn son Anthony — had died in a car crash outside Philadelphia.

Dead-alive Anthony Summers applied for a social security number at the age of eighteen. He’d attended school in Queens then CCNY for one semester. Tony’s essays, forged grades and test scores (taken after graduation) were good enough for a transfer to Yale.

At the end of his junior year Tony had his first name legally changed to John, after Violet’s cuckold husband, and his last name to Woman in homage to Detective Margolis making him say, “I am your woman.”

He kept using the name Anthony Summers until after entering graduate school at Harvard.

He was a new man in a new world ready to live life freely and without consequence.