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.”