Carmella Commands/Chapter 17
n her shame and terror at being caught, Carmella awaited anything, her brain numb and her body suddenly cold. She expected Dixon to say that she was a harpy—she had read the word somewhere—and explain that he was only waiting to drive her to the police station and give her up.
Dixon turned casually to his employer’s angry question.
“You know Carmella Coletta, Mr. Barrington. Her dad’s your cellar man out at Greendale. Remember how she fought off the fake business agent one day?”
Mr. Barrington grunted. He had never quite forgiven himself for yielding to Carmella’s hold-up on the price of her father’s lots. But he had admired her beyond measure on the day of which Dixon spoke.
“Well,” went on the chauffeur, “I saw her hurrying past here a few minutes ago and stopped her to find out if she couldn’t hurry Tommaso and his gang. She didn’t want to wait; said she was due home. I said I was sure you’d like to get her help and would let me drive her there.”
Mr. Barrington was silent for a moment, as if digesting this novel idea of doing business through a schoolgirl who was younger than his own pampered and futile Margaret. Yet he remembered that this same child had beaten him in a real estate deal, and had saved the day when a grafter appeared.
Carmella needed the delay to adjust herself. She turned a glance of worshiping gratitude on Dixon. She had not known there were such men in the world—men who would brave their jobs to cover a foolish girl’s folly. Never would she forget the way in which she had forced herself on him.
“What do you know about your father’s business?” Mr. Barrington suddenly growled. In his moment of reflection he had decided to try her out. Either she could help, or she was a nuisance. He would find out which.
“He’s got a job on his hands,” said Carmella, finding her voice with difficulty.
“Then why’s he falling down on it?”
“I know he’s not speeding up to match the Cronin crowd,” she answered. “He hasn’t got the men, and he hasn’t got the trucks.”
“Then why doesn’t he get ’em? I’ve told him to.”
“Did you advance him the money to?” asked Carmella, with surprising calmness.
Mr. Barrington thereupon lost his temper.
“Did I what?” he roared, in tones that made the traffic officer turn.
“Did you advance the money?”
“What! Why should I? Why should I?”
The real estate promoter was growing incoherent, and Carmella thereupon grew calmer. She was used to anger and its weaknesses.
“Because,” she said softly, “you’re trying to speed him up beyond what you said when you hired him to break your strike out there. He broke it. Then you changed your plans. But you didn’t help him to meet them. It takes money to expand a job.”
“He’s got credit, if he’s a real contractor,” sputtered the promoter.
“Sure he’s got credit—up to the size job it was when he took it. But now his credit depends on yours, Mr. Barrington. If you’re good for it, why don’t you lend it to him?”
Carmella spoke firmly, almost as if rebuking a child. The silence that followed was broken only by the soft hum of the motor as Dixon, without orders, began slowly, very slowly, to drive toward Doty Street. His admiration for the girl was equal to her gratitude to him. Where in the world, he queried, did such a child pick up such knowledge of grown-up affairs. He wished he dared look around to see how his employer was taking it. Carmella herself broke the long silence.
“I gotta get home!” she exclaimed. “Dad’ll be sore.”
“Take her home, Dixon, as you promised,” said Mr. Barrington.
“Yes, sir!” said Dixon, inwardly chuckling.
Presently Carmella turned with the instinct of sociability and said:
“How do you like the booze Mike sends you, Mr. Barrington?”
“Wh-what’s that? Mike? What the⸺ Mike who?”
“Why, Mike Laudini, your bootlegger. Dad says he’s the only honest one there is.”
“For the love of⸺” began Mr. Barrington. Then he whistled softly. Then:
“How’d you come to think he was my bootlegger?” Carmella realized that she had committed a social error. It ran through her thoughts that possibly a bootlegger’s customers did not like all the world to know.
“Why, Mr. Barrington,” she lied blithely, “I’ve worked for Mike, vacations and Saturdays. I thought of course you knew I knew you bought from Mike.”
So naturally did she lie that the perturbed patron of the contraband arts was satisfactorily deceived. Carmella caught Dixon’s glance of reproof and turned again to the real estate man.
“But you wanted me to talk about dad and his gang, didn’t you?”
“Yes, yes, yes! What I want to know is, would he put on more steam if he had the capital?”
“You bet he would,” Carmella answered easily. “He’s going to be a big man some day. But he won’t jump farther than he can land on his feet, my dad won’t. If he had the price, he’d be ahead of you instead of behind.”
In the pause that followed Carmella asked Dixon to stop around the corner from her house. Just as she was getting out, Mr. Barrington asked:
“Will you be there, out in Greendale, tomorrow morning, young lady?”
“Why should I?” asked Carmella softly.
“Because I say so! Because I want to talk turkey with your dad!”
Mr. Barrington shouted his answer, while Dixon, grinning, said out of the side of his mouth:
“Try, kid!”
“Thanks for the ride, Mr. Dixon,” said Carmella, ignoring his employer as she darted toward the corner.
“Funny kid!” said Mr. Barrington, perplexed.
Tommaso came into the house presently, tired and silent as usual. Carmella greeted him with extra solicitude, but did not try to make him talk. At supper, however, she saw that his wine glass was kept filled.
“You’re tired, padre,” she said once.
“Yes!” he answered, and drank the grape juice that had inadvertently fermented the winter before.
That evening Carmella washed the dishes almost faster than both brother and sister could dry them, and hurried into the living room. Tommaso was sitting in his Morris chair, smoking. She went to the phonograph and selected as the record Verdi’s “Home to Our Mountains.”
It was perhaps her father’s favorite of favorites. She noted his pleasure as the first notes sounded, and knew that he was in a mood for music. Then came “I Have Sighed to Rest Me”; and “Happy Bridal Day” from Lucia. These three, she knew, were the records that Tommaso played most often.
As he half dozed, basking in memories of Italy, she asked:
“How’s the work going, padre?”
“We are working,” he replied.
“Listen, padre caro! Let me go with you tomorrow. Please?”
“You have your school.”
“Ah, but padre carissimo, only this very day Mr. Carroll, the principal, said I should learn to help my father. It is good to learn to do that, he said, and the school is only part of the learning. He said those very words to me, padre.”
“Well,” answered Tommaso sleepily, “I shall see in the morning.”
Carmella rushed to the kitchen, where her mother was preparing for the morrow’s breakfast.
“Mother of mine,” she cried, “you are to wake me when father wakes.”
“But⸺” began the tired and perplexed mother.
“He has need of me,” said Carmella firmly.
Maria sighed, and as that evening she mended torn clothing the phrase ran through and through her mind. “He has need of me.”
Ten years ago, back in Italy, the sighed-for land, Tommaso had had need of her. He had told her so, with awkward caresses. She wondered, like blind groping in the dark, if he had need of her now, or was conscious of it.
And her children! Did they have need of her? Carmella had not. And Giuseppe, the sunny-eyed, was already beginning to prefer those associates who spoke the language of this drear country. Only the youngest three . . .
And they—ah! Day by day they were growing older and less in need.
In the morning she woke Carmella with the usual difficulty. “Your father⸺” she began, and Carmella bounded from the bed. As Tommaso rose from the breakfast table Carmella dashed in and seized a cup of coffee. He looked doubtfully at his daughter.
“How about school?” he asked.
“Oh, I’m ahead of my class. And I told you last night that Mr. Carroll said that school was only a part. Besides, you promised.”
Tommaso reflected. He did not remember whether or not he had, for he had been half asleep at the time.
“Va bene!” he said. “Come quickly.”
The girl jumped and ran with him, in spite of Maria’s protests.
The truck which served both to carry workers to and from the city and to haul earth from the cellars was waiting at the corner, two of Tommaso’s crew already in it. Three more were picked up at the next street, and others at scattering points along the way.
“Where’s Salvatore?” demanded Tommaso, as he counted his men.
“Don’t know,” answered the driver. “He said last night maybe he had another job.”
Carmella looked quickly at her father. Only two trucks and these few men. No wonder the masons and carpenters were being delayed.
At Greendale Carmella was surprised at the progress made. She turned to the truck driver.
“Is this as far along as Elm Heights?”
“No, no, no!” he said quickly. “They have four trucks and twenty men digging. They’ll beat us with the first houses to sell.”
“What does that amount to?”
“What does it amount to? It amounts to that they will have the first sales, and that means the quickest growth. It means that their land will rise in price quicker than ours. It means that—Santo Dia!—it means that we are slow. No Mussolini! No pep!”
He spat the last word out like an expletive.
Presently Dixon swung into the plat, and Mr. Barrington emerged from the sedan. Tommaso was busy and did not see him. And Mr. Barrington purposely did not see Tommaso. It was his invariable strategy that any interview should be begun by the other side Carmella, instantly alert, walked toward the car.
“Hello, Kid Kate!” he exclaimed cordially.
“Good morning! Thank you for the ride home last night. I forgot.”
“You thanked Dixon, all right.”
“Yes, but it was your car. I should have said it to you. I’m sorry.”
“By George, what a kid!” thought Mr. Barrington, thinking the while of his own polished daughter’s carefully cultivated rudeness.
As they talked, Tommaso came slowly toward them. Slowly and doubtfully. He knew that all was not going well. For days he had been sick of the job, sick of the constant harassment from unknown sources—frequent inspections and criticism from town officials. He would like to quit.
But the Colettas did not quit. He had it on his father’s word, backed by the word of his grandfather, years ago, back in Italy. He had fought the strike, but he hated to fight unseen opponents.
The trio stood silent for several moments. Mr. Barrington was determined that Tommaso should make the first move. Carmella, inwardly frightened but outwardly calm, did not know what to say. Tommaso rarely spoke first in any matter.
It was Dixon, seeing the impasse and sensing its cause, who stepped forward and broke the spell.
“Hello, Tommaso!” he exclaimed. “How does it go?”
Tommaso grinned, but shook his head dubiously.
“Here you, Kid Kate,” said Mr. Barrington. “You interpret. Ask him if he could do faster work if he had more men and trucks.”
“Of course he could,” answered the girl. “I won’t ask him any such silly question.”
“Oh, you won’t! Well, ask him if he will get more men and trucks if I advance the money. Will you ask him that, Miss Won’t?”
“Sure I’ll ask him that,” said Carmella. She talked some minutes with her father in Italian, weighing his replies and then asking more questions, until Mr. Barrington fidgeted. Finally, turning to him, she said:
“My father says he can and will. What are you going to do about it?”
For the next half hour Carmella stood between the two men, translating their “ifs” and “ands” more or less to suit her own ideas. Keenly alert to the need of seeing that Tommaso made the right answers, she was still conscious of an underlying cause of worriment.
Nobody had mentioned the green and red dress she had donned for the occasion. She wondered if Dixon had not noticed it.
“Why on earth does everybody in the world have to be dumb?” she thought to herself. And then, turning to her father, she explained:
“He says he will finance you, week by week, for two more trucks and up to twenty-five men. You could beat that union gang at Elm Heights with that, padre.”
Tommaso thought a moment, and then said “Yes.” Carmella could have wept for joy. Instead, she turned to Mr. Barrington:
“My father says he will get trucks and men if you will pay him by the week instead of by the job. And then your land will sell better. Shall I tell him you say you will?”
Mr. Barrington nodded.
“Say it!” commanded Carmella. “Say what you mean! We don’t take nods in our business.”
“All right! I say it. I will. Tell him that.”
“Damn that kid!” said he to himself later, as he recalled the scene. And, although matters went well from that moment in Greendale, he repeated the invective at intervals for weeks. Yet each time he thought it he wished that his own daughter were more like Carmella.
Carmella followed him to his car.
“Are you going to take me home?” she asked. “Or I’ll have to walk. Your busses aren’t any good till they run.”
“Take her home,” said the promoter, settling into the entire rear seat. Carmella slipped happily in beside Dixon.
“All right, kid?” asked the latter, from the side of his mouth.
“Dandy!” she replied. ‘“And—thank you—Mr. Dixon.”
She glanced back and saw that the promoter was nodding, with closed eyes.
“Say, Mr. Dixon,” she asked, “whose driver are you, his or hers?”
Dixon chuckled softly.
“The Missus’,” he said. “There’s a squabble about that every day or so. He gets me only when she hasn’t any heavy society stuff on. When she has, he uses taxis, believe me. He ought to have two cars, but he can’t learn to drive himself.”
Carmella laughed quietly but fervently. Even the big men of the world were ruled by their wives, she discovered.
As the sedan stopped in front of the cottage, Carmella turned:
“Thank you for the ride in, Mr. Barrington,” she called, loudly enough to rouse him.
“What’s that? Oh, yes, all right!” exclaimed the realtor. “Glad to do it.”
To Dixon, she merely winked.
“Gosh, what a kid!” exclaimed the chauffeur.
“What’s that, Dixon?”
“I only asked where to now, sir.”
“Bankers’ Club, and speed it. I’m late.”
Carmella ran into the house, loudly calling for dinner.
“No wonder,” said her mother. “You ate no breakfast.”
“I had better than that,” said the girl.
Her mother eyed her doubtfully, and said:
“You must eat quickly, or you’ll be late for afternoon school.”
“I’m not going to school this afternoon. I’m going to celebrate.”
“Have you finished your father’s need of you?”
“For today, yes!”
“Then you shall go to school.”
“I shall not!” declared Carmella in English.
Then for minutes it happened that mother and daughter scolded each other, each talking a different language. Carmella’s advantage lay in the fact that she could understand her mother’s Italian, whereas Maria understood only scattered words of Carmella’s fast English.
But she understood the tone. It is a thing that happens every day in some home of foreign-born parents and native-bred children. It is a tragedy that the world has not yet listed as such. Yet it is more poignant than any other.
Carmella spent the afternoon in a picture house with Nicolo.