The meal went on for hours, they would sit at the table and dip cling peaches in wine, allowing the thick golden fruit to soak there for a bit, and then bringing it dripping red to the mouth on a toothpick. His grandfather would say "Sonny, here, have some," and hold out the red-stained toothpick with the rich juicy slice of fruit on its end, tart, strong, sweet, everything. The kids would run through the length of the railroad flat, chasing each other, and his grandmother would yell for them to stop before the people downstairs banged on the ceiling with a broom handle, and they would stop for a little while, collapsing on the big bed in the front room, his head close to his sister's, all of them sweating, all the kids in the family, more kids all the time, all of them giggling and sweating on the bed with the picture of Jesus Christ over it holding his hand above his exposed heart and sunshine spikes radiating from his head. "That's God," his cousin Joey once said. "The Jews killed him," He asked his grandmother about it one time, and she said, "That's right, Sonny, the Jews killed him," and then she told a story about a Jew who went to church one day and received holy communion and then ran out of the church and took the wafer out of his mouth immediately and went home and nailed it to the wall. "And do you know what happened to that holy bread, Sonny? It began to bleed. And it never stopped bleeding. It just kept bleeding all over that Jew's floor."
"What did he do?" Arthur asked.
"What did who do?" his grandmother said.
"The Jew. What did he do about all that blood?"
His grandmother had shrugged and gone back to cooking something on the big wood stove in the kitchen, black and monstrous, always pouring heat and steam. "Wiped it up, I guess," she said. "How do I know what he did?"
But every time he looked at that picture of Jesus with the heart stuck on his chest as if he had just had surgery and they were showing how easy it was to expose a human heart these days, the drops of blood dripping down from it, and Jesus' hand just a little above it, and his head tilted back with his eyes sort of rolled up in his head like a character in an Eisenstein movie, he always thought of the Jew who nailed the communion wafer to the wall, and he always wondered first why the Jew would want to nail the thing to the wall to begin with, and second what he had done about all the blood. In high school, after he had moved to the Bronx and met Rubin, he realized his grandmother was full of shit, and he never trusted her very much after that, her and her communion nailed to the wall.
His sister Julia broke his head one time, this was about the time he fell in love with Virginia Kelly. Irish girls after that were all premised on Virginia, the sixth grade Virginia with long black hair and green eyes fringed with black lashes and budding little breasts — he hadn't been too aware of those at the time — and a way of tilting her head back to laugh, at him most of the time, which was the unfortunate part of it all. But oh how he loved that girl! He would watch her and watch her and notice everything she did or said, and then come home and tell his sister about it, which is why she broke his head one day. She broke his head with a stupid little kid's pocketbook by swinging it at him on its chain and clobbering him with the clasp, and all because he told her she would never be as beautiful as Virginia Kelly, no one in the world would ever be as beautiful as Virginia Kelly, she had clobbered him, wham! Even then she had a lot of spunk, you had to have spunk to live in the same house with a man like his father, boy, what a battle that had turned out to be years later. Where the hell are you now, Julie, living with your engineer husband and your two Norwegian kids in where the hell, Minnesota? There's no such place as Minnesota, don't kid me, sis. Do you remember breaking my head, and then crying when Mama took me to the druggist, and he examined it — who went to doctors in those days? — and wiped the blood away and said, "You've broken his head, young lady," and then put a strip of plaster on it? It was okay in a week or so, but boy did you cry, I really loved you Julie. You were a really nice sister to have, I hope your Norwegian loves you half as much as I did.
He met Virginia Kelly in the hall one day, he was coming back from the boys' room and he had the wooden pass in his hand, and Virginia stopped him. He was nine years old, and she was ten and big for her age, and she stopped him and said, "Don't look at me anymore, Stupid."
"Who's looking at you?" he said, but his heart was pounding, and he wanted to kiss her, wanted to kiss this quintessence of everything alien to him, the sparkling green eyes and the wild Irish way of tossing her head, all, everything. Years later, when he read Ulysses, he knew every barmaid in the book because they were all Virginia Kelly who told him once to stop looking at her, Stupid, and whom he never looked at again from that day forward though it broke his heart.
When he moved to the Bronx, the only person he thought he missed was Virginia Kelly. He would lie awake in bed at night and think of Virginia, and when he learned how to masturbate, he would conjure visions of this laughing Irish girl and ravage her repeatedly until one morning Julie said to him, "Hey, I have to make the beds around here, you know," and he pretended he didn't know what she meant, but after that he masturbated secretly in the bathroom and carefully wiped up after him with toilet paper. Somewhere along the line, he switched from raping Virginia Kelly to raping Hedy Lamarr, and he never thought of her again except once or twice when he remembered that there were people in this world who drove in red convertibles with their long black hair blowing in the wind, laughing, wearing silk stockings and loafers, the idealization of everything that seemed to him American, everything that seemed to him non-Harlem and non-Italian. Once, in high school, Rubin said to him in the boys' room, jokingly, "Where else but in America could an Italian and a Jew piss side by side in the same bowl?" and he had laughed because he laughed at everything Rubin said, Rubin was so much smarter and better informed than he, but he didn't really get the joke. He did not by that time see anything funny about being Italian, nor could he understand what Rubin thought was so funny about being Jewish. It never once occurred to him, not then, and not later when he was hobnobbing it around Hollywood with stars and starlets and all that crap, nor even when he laid a famous movie queen who kept calling him Artie, for which he almost busted her in the mouth, except she really was as passionate as she came over on the screen, not in all those years, not ever in his life until perhaps this moment when he felt so terribly alone enmeshed in a law system created by Englishmen, not once did he ever realize how dearly he had loved Harlem, or how much it had meant to him to be Italian.
There was in his world a cluttered brimming external existence, and an interior solitude that balanced each other perfectly and resulted in, he realized, a serene childhood, even in the midst of a depression, even though his father was a mysterious government employee known as "a substitute" instead of "a regular," which he gathered was highly more desirable. There was an immutable pattern in his household, the same foods were eaten on the identical night each week, Monday was soup which his mother made herself, he hated soup meat, it was stringy and tasteless. Tuesday night was spaghetti with either meatballs or braciòla, Wednesday night was breaded veal cutlets with spinach and mashed potatoes, his mother once dumped a whole bowl of mashed potatoes on his head because he was trying to catch a fly as a specimen for the microscope he had got for Christmas. He threw a dissecting needle at the fly on the wall and, uncanny luck, pierced the fly, even Errol Flynn couldn't have done better. ("You got 'im, Sonny!" Julie shrieked in delight.) But a lot of gooey white glop came out of the fly and he refused to eat his mashed potatoes after that. So his mother, naturally, having inherited a few Neapolitan traits from Grandpa, even though she herself had been born and raised in the garden spot called Harlem, picked up the bowl of potatoes and dumped the whole thing on his head. His father laughed. He hated his father for two months after that. Couldn't he have at least said it wasn't nice to dump a bowl of mashed potatoes all over a kid who was maybe a budding scientist and certainly the best dissecting needle thrower in the United States?