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for your baby in this house. Right in this house. It was the eighth of August, last year, during that night.”
    It was her first statement that sank home. I stopped eating and looked at her. Then I remembered. Joyce and I had indeed been in San Juan last August. We had slept on the studio couch in Mama’s parlor. I remembered the night very well. It was a squeaky studio couch and we decided not to try anything. There had been no conception that night. Mama was all wrong about that.
    “No, she’s not,” Papa said.
    “What makes you so sure?”
    Mama smiled. “Because I sprinkled salt in your bed.”
    Papa grinned.
    “That’s right. Salt in the bed. I gave the order.”
    It was very annoying. They were quite smug, taking credit for everything. I told them I didn’t remember salt in the bed. This amused Mama.
    “Of course not. I put it under the sheets.”
    Papa chuckled.
    “So now you’re gonna have a baby.”
    “Salt,” I said. “What poppycock!”
    “Cock nothing,” Papa said. “How do you suppose you was born?”
    “The usual way.”
    “Wrong again. Salt in the bed. I put it there myself.”
    I pushed my glass forward, to be filled again.
    “Superstition. Ignorance.”
    He refused to fill my glass.
    “Don’t call me ignorance. I’m your Papa.”
    “I didn’t say you were ignorant.”
    “I want respect for your Papa. This is your Papa’s house. Here, I’m the boss.”
    He was red-faced with quick indignation, filling the glass with trembling fingers, spilling some of the wine. It was bad luck to spill wine. You warded off the ill fortune by making the sign of the cross through the spilled liquor. This Mama did.
    ‘Your Papa’s right,” she soothed. “We didn’t have any garlic in the house that night, so Papa used salt. It was his own idea.”
    “Garlic?” I looked into Mama’s large green eyes. “Why garlic?”
    “To put in the keyhole.”
    “Is that suppose to bring babies?”
    “Not plain babies— boy babies.”
    That stopped me cold. It brought a triumphant sneer from Papa.
    “Look who’s calling his Papa ignorance! He don’t know nothing.”
    I swallowed wine, said nothing.
    “The same with Tony and Jim,” Mama said.
    “Garlic in the keyhole when they were born?”
    “Both times,” Papa said.
    “And Stella?”
    But I already knew his answer:
    “No garlic, no salt, no nothing.”
    He would argue, so I kept still. He filled my glass again.
    “I only went to the third grade,” he mused. “But you—you’re supposed to have a big education, high school, two years of college, and you’re still a kid. You got lots to learn.”
    I was not so ignorant as he imagined. I had learned plenty in that family, ever since childhood, all sorts of priceless learning handed down from generations of Abruz-zian forebears. But I found much of this knowledge difficult to use. For example, I had known for years that the way to avoid witches was to wear a fringed shawl, for the attacking witch got distracted counting the fringes and never bothered you. I also knew that cow’s urine was simply marvelous for growing hair on bald heads, but up to now I had no occasion to apply this information. I knew, of course, that the cure for measles was a red scarf, and the cure for sore throat was a black scarf. As a child, whenever I got a fever, my Grandma always fastened a piece of lemon to my wrist; it lowered the fever every time. I knew too that the evil eye caused headaches, and my Grandma used to send me out in the rain to plunge a knife in the ground, thus diverting the lightning from our house. I knew that if you slept with the windows open, all the witches in the community entered your house, and that if you must sleep in the fresh air, a bit of black pepper sprinkled along the window sill caused the witches to sneeze and back off. I also knew that the way to avoid infection when visiting a sick friend was to spit on his door. All these things, and many more, I had known for years, and