Уолтер Мосли - John Woman

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.