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none.
    “Don’t thank me ,” she mumbled, too pleased and embarrassed to acknowledge the first such compliment she had ever received.
    No sooner had Lino shut the door behind them then he spun around and slapped Catherine’s face.
    “What was that for?” Catherine, who’d been raised to decipher the occult meanings of men’s insults and slaps, now had the distinct impression that Lino was actually pleased with her. Perhaps this was what he’d meant when he’d told her to show the Santangelos how the Falconettis could cook a piece of meat. Perhaps, for some perverse reason of his own, he’d wanted her to serve a meal bad enough to scare off the Santangelos.
    “For putting crap like that on the table.”
    “Crap? You heard your friend Santangelo. The food was great.”
    “Great,” mimicked Lino. “Since when has love got taste buds?”
    “Love? What’s this got to do with love?”
    “What else do you think this meal was about? The good-neighbor policy? You’re marrying that guy. It’s settled. I’ve given my word.”
    “ Your word? Papa, this isn’t the old country. It’s America.”
    “It’s my house,” said Lino, but Catherine had already left it. Pushing past him, she ran down the stairs and didn’t stop till she reached the ticket booth of the Essex theater.
    The Heiress was almost over, and Catherine was glad. Tonight, Olivia de Havilland and Montgomery Clift depressed her. She sat through the second feature, To Have and Have Not, which she’d missed in its first run, years before.
    By the time she left the theater, the temperature and humidity had dropped; it was a crisp autumn night. All the way home, Catherine kept thinking of Bogart and Bacall—their teasing and fencing and falling in love. Somehow these thoughts led to Joseph Santangelo—how tough he’d acted in his shop, how sweet he’d been in her apartment, smiling and telling her that the food was great.
    That night, as Catherine got into bed, she found herself thinking that life was more like the movies than she’d ever dreamed.
    Long ago, when an erupting volcano threatened Mrs. Santangelo’s ancestral home, a teenage boy named Gennaro waited till the last possible moment, then ran up to the smoldering crater, arms outstretched as if to greet a long-lost friend. Down below, the Neapolitans watched him catch the flowing lava in his arms and prayed for Gennaro’s soul. But their newfound patron saint survived to turn and wave, leaving his impression in the hissing rock, a fossil of two open arms preserved to this day in the hillside above Mrs. Santangelo’s birthplace.
    If San Gennaro could do that, thought Mrs. Santangelo, he could tell her what her Joseph saw in a girl like Catherine Falconetti.
    She lit a votive candle in a beveled glass holder and set it on the mantelpiece which served as the family altar: a plaster Madonna, a statuette of Gennaro with his arms spread wide, and a photo of her husband Zio, framed in gold and matted with black crepe.
    “Holy Saint,” whispered Mrs. Santangelo, easing herself down on her knees. “I’m not praying for a miracle. Just a simple explanation.”
    After a while she got up and slid the candle over in front of the photo.
    “Zio,” she said. “How about it? How could a smart boy like our son marry a Falconetti?”
    It was not a rhetorical question; Carmela Santangelo fully expected an answer. Every few weeks, she was visited by the ghost of her late husband.
    The first time, not long after his death, she was roused from a deep sleep by the smell of cigars.
    “God help me, I’ll kill you!” she screamed, forgetting he was dead. “Are you smoking in bed again?”
    Only later, when she saw him hovering in the corner and realized the truth, did she think how fitting it was that the presence of a man’s ghost should be announced by his worst habit. Much of Carmela Santangelo’s life had been a struggle against Zio’s cigars; in the end, the cigars had won. Yet that night,