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.”