Signor Di Bello returned to New York in high spirits. Whether the proofs of Juno’s attempted bigamy were and always had been myths of Tomato’s fancy was not the question that seemed to him of most import now. What towered above all else was the monolithic fact that the proofs were missing, and Juno might be his, after all. As the wish gained firmer hold on the thought, he began to view the doings of the past two days as moves in a miscarried plot of his sister’s to cheat him of the woman who challenged his taste.
In the train he sat apart from Carolina and Armando and nursed his delight. They could see that he was gloating over the events that had cast them into hopeless gloom. And while they brooded, Signor Di Bello replanned his wedding. Arrived in Mulberry, he made straight for the Restaurant of Santa Lucia and caroled the triumphant tidings to Juno.
“Did I not tell you they were a flock of geese?” he said, passing the bottle of barbera. “There was no bust, and, of course, no husband. But there will be a husband on the Feast of Sunday, my very sympathetic one,” he cooed.
“Ah! Bertino has received my letter and fled,” she mused under her fallen eyelids as she tipped the glass.
That evening Signor Di Bello observed to Carolina:
“There will be a wedding in this house next Sunday. The priest will not be the harebrained Father Nicodemo. I shall invite many of my Genovese friends, some Milanesi, some Torinesi, and a few of the first families of the Calabriani, the Siciliani, and the Napolitani, for I am a man above race prejudice.”
It was what she had dreaded since the moment Bridget made known the fact of Bertino’s melting away. Convinced—without proof, however—that Juno was his wife, she had resolved never to live under a bigamous roof, though she might, with a wife of her own selection, endure life in a monogamous household. Wherefore she would secede from Casa Di Bello—embrace again the rubric peace of the anagamous rectory. Father Nicodemo had given her repeated assurance that the latchstring was always hanging out; that the spaghetti sauces had never been proper since she left; that they had despaired of having a palatable dish of boiled snails fricasseed with pepper pods.
“Very well, my brother,” she returned frostily; “when that Neapolitan baggage comes in, I go out.”
“Ah, you will enter the Church again, I suppose,” he taunted. “Have I not said it truly—once a priest always a priest?”