Carmella Commands/Chapter 3
armella, meanwhile, had come running to the yellow cottage on Doty Street, a dingy cottage with a ten-foot depth of front yard and room for grapes at the back. In marked contrast to the square-front tenements on both sides and across the street. Carmella reveled in the feeling of glorious superiority a one-family house gave her.
Before she had turned the corner she had known what to prepare for. A strange man in a gray suit, with baggy trousers, with some kind of a book in one hand and a pencil in the other, and her mother shrieking maledictions which the gray-clad man would not understand, because they were in Italian. It was exactly so.
The gray-clad young man, speaking English; Maria Coletta, Carmella’s mother, highly angry and shouting Italian. With neighbors and neighbors’ children gathered around the yellow gate. When Carmella arrived the argument had reached high-C. She rushed to her mother’s side and faced the stranger.
“Say,” she cried in English, “cut the comedy and come down to cases with me. What in hell do you want with m’ mother?”
Mrs. Coletta glanced proudly at the assembled neighbors. Perhaps she was helpless in the face of English speech, but she had a daughter! And such a daughter!
“Who the hell are you, kid?” demanded the stranger, taken by surprise.
“I’m the talking member of this firm, Mr. Smarty,” said Carmella. “I pay the taxes and the graft and I know Tim O’Neil, the big cop down at headquarters. That’s me! Now who are you and what do you want?”
“Well, you’re some kid, all right,” exclaimed the stranger. “Now look here, kid⸺”
“Miss Coletta is my name,” said Carmella.
“Yeh! Miss Coletta. All I’m doing is to collect poll tax figures. Who’s your dad?”
“Who’s your old man?” asked Carmella.
“Cut that out!” said the canvasser. “I’m official. Now who’s the men folks around this house?”
“Are you a cop?” asked Carmella.
She had heard of plain clothes men.
“Nothing like it,” said the stranger.
“Then show me a badge. If you’re official, you gotta badge.”
Mr. Stephens, college sophomore, pulled open his coat and showed a nickel badge.
Carmella inspected it carefully.
“That’s all right!” she said. “Now what do you want to know?”
“How many folks are there in this family over twenty-one?” said Mr. Stephens.
“Not a one only dad,” said Carmella. “And mother,” she added.
Mr. Stephens, laboriously working his way through college, thereupon took from Carmella the necessary facts concerning Tommaso Coletta, contractor, and his wife, Maria, Mrs. Coletta glaring heavily the while.
As the young man went out through the yellow gate she turned to Carmella, saying in Italian, her only language:
“Why were you over to the House, you runaway?”
“They sent for me.”
“What for?”
“To ask questions.”
“What questions?”
“Oh, just questions.”
“How often have I told you not to go over to the House without you ask?”
“Aw, mother, forget it!”
“Forget it, shall I? Forget it? Listen, girl! You mind me or you get hurt. Come with me!”
She laid a heavy hand on Carmella’s arm, starting for the door.
“You lick me again and I forget English!” screamed Carmella.
This was a new threat she had lately evolved, and it frightened her mother.
“Oh-ho! You forget English, do you? Then I bet your father he make you remember. I tell him when he comes home.”
“Oh, cara madre, don’t tell dad. He hits to hurt.”
“Ah-ha! Maybe you like it not that I tell him. Then what about it that you forget English?”
“Gee, mother! I’ll remember.”
“I’ll bet you do,” said Mrs. Coletta.
Mother and daughter went into the yellow cottage together—two generations a thousand years apart.
Tommaso was late in his home-coming that night, and Carmella studied his mood closely. There was still a question in her mind whether her mother would tell him that she had disobeyed. He had a way of questioning that seemed to command Maria to tell him everything.
Carmella was afraid of him—and he was the only individual in the world of whom she was afraid. It would not have been good for her, at thirteen, to know that he also was afraid of her; that he was afraid of all his English-chattering children. But chiefly afraid of Carmella, she being the oldest and the one on whom both parents relied to interpret their wishes to a world that did not speak their language.
Carmella spoke three separate tongues. In school she used a stilted, formal English, often putting “dis” for “this,” but closely following the textbooks in style. At home she spoke Italian to her parents, and a pidgin-mixture with her younger brothers and sisters. Elsewhere she spoke a haphazard jumble of the two, American slang preferred, as with Mrs. Barrington—a very unbookish jargon.
She knew that her command of the speech of the country gave her an advantage over her mother. In a vague way she felt that it did over her father. But Tommaso Coletta was not so easily bluffed as was his wife. He mingled more with men and affairs. Once Carmella had threatened him by saying that she would forget English. And he had responded by punishing her with a severity that was unusual even for him.
It would have amazed them both to know that his daily questioning of his wife about the children’s behavior, and the severity of his whippings when they had misbehaved, were reactions of his unformulated fear—his fear of children who dwelt in another language—the fear of the hen which has hatched duck’s eggs and sees her offspring swimming.
Carmella had watched her father come down the street and turn into the yard. He was tired—she could tell by his walk. A bullet wound he had received at the Piave never troubled him except when he was tired. Then it gave him a slight limp. He had come to America only after he had served his country in the war. Carmella and Giuseppe were only babies then. There had been three others since.
“Buona sera, papa carissimo!” she cried at the door.
The warmth of her greeting pleased him more than he would or could have told. Carmella was not usually demonstrative in affection.
“Hello, piccola ragazza!” he said, catching her in his arms. “I hope you have behaved well today, ragazzina.”
“But, padre,” protested Carmella, “you shouldn’t call me ragazzina. I’m too big for that.”
“Too big for what, innesta?” he retorted, laughing.
Carmella did not mind being called an imp when Tommaso was in good humor. It was an unusual word for him. Before she could reply, he was calling to his wife.
“Hello, Maria cara! Have all the little ones behaved today?”
Carmella shot a glowering glance at her mother.
“Pretty well,” said the latter, after an instant’s hesitation.
“That’s good! That’s good! I’m tired, and don’t want to have to punish anybody.”
He went to the kitchen, washed, then returned to the living room and sat down in the Morris chair that he had insisted on adding to the installment house’s complete outfit for six rooms. Tommaso especially liked two things about America. He had never seen a Morris chair before, and he found it good. Also he liked the money it was possible to earn here.
“Carmella,” he said, “I wish to talk with you.”
“Si, padre! E lanciari!”
Tommaso frowned. It was a phrase like this, which though slang in America, was nothing at all when translated literally into his own Neapolitan, that caused him worry. “Shoot it!” What did the girl mean? Yet that was what she had said.
In tiny ways like this Carmella had become a continual torment.
But Tommaso had heard talk from others about daughters. Even about American daughters. He had heard that they worried their parents as well.
What should worry them he could not entirely gather. Per la Madonna! They at least spoke the same language as their daughters. If only he could be as glib of speech as Carmella! Then he would know, and he could be a father to her, and she should grow up to be a fine young woman, and marry well, and⸺
He meant that she should do so, anyway. But it was hard, hard, hard. It brought wrinkles between his eyes. Trying to found a business and to bring up a family, both in an unknown tongue. And heavens, how he loved the girl! He had loved Maria, his wife. Yes, he still loved her. But Carmella—ah! There was a girl for you! If only she didn’t forever slip out of his world into a foreign world of speech.
“Listen to me, Carmella,” he said. And as he spoke he took out a stained brown leather billfold and counted out ten one-dollar bills.
“Listen, Carmella! Here is ten dollars. It is for the payment on the victrola—the last payment. You pay it tomorrow. Then we own it. How’s that, Carmella? We own it! It is ours! Do you like that?”
“Sure!” said Carmella. “And then we can get a radio?”
“Radio all’ inferno!” exclaimed Tommaso. “It be damn!” he went on, relapsing into such American idiom as he knew, exactly as his English-speaking children, when angry, relapsed into Italian profanity. “Does radio speak Italian, I ask you? Does it sound to me in my own speech? No! Then we do not have radio.”
“All right, all right, dad! Everybody else does. That’s all. I don’t care so much about it myself. Too much jazz! And anyway, I can listen over at Nick’s.”
“Over where?” Tommaso was at once alert. “Nicolo Pieri?”
“Sure, dad! Across the street. He’s a lively kid. And his radio is the best on Doty Street. Five tubes. Gee, it’s a wonder!”
“So that is another thing for me to talk to you about. One is pay for the victrola tomorrow. It is the day.”
“I’ll do it, dad.”
“And make him give you the paper which says it is all mine, and not part his.”
“Yes, dad!”
“That is one thing. Then this Nicolo Pieri. He is not so good a boy. I hear it talked. The polizia, they know him. He does nothing yet, but they watch. I do not like that you should like him.”
“Oh, sul-lush!”
“What is it you say, Carmella mia? ‘Sul-lush!’”
“I mean, dad, that Nick is all right. He’s a good kid. Just lively, that’s all. And since his dad got killed last year his mother is trying to hold him too tight. Nick likes a good time. He built his own radio, you know. And he’s the boy Mr. Carroll, the principal down to the school, got to do everything for him last year.”
“Does this Mr. Carroll know boys?”
“Santo Dio! He ought to. He gets four thousand a year for pretending to, anyway. And I guess that’s that.”
These phrases of American, spoken in Italian, perplexed Tommaso. They said so much and meant so little. When he was a boy, in the outskirts of Naples—ah, children didn’t talk to their parents like that. He decided to pass on to his final theme.
“Is there school tomorrow, Carmella?”
“Sure not! It’s Saturday, isn’t it?”
“I thought so. Then I wish you to talk for me, out a t our land in Greendale.”
“Santo fumo!” exclaimed Carmella, and her father frowned.
Here again was that trick of speech which Carmella had unconsciously formed, turning an American bit of slang or expletive into literal Italian, where it meant nothing at all. She had thought to say “Holy smoke!” but the literal translation did not correspond in idea. Tommaso was growing impatient with senseless exclamations.
“What is it that you say?” he demanded.
“Mio Dio! So I meant, father. But land in Greendale. Us?”
“Si!”
“What are you doing with land in Greendale, dad?”
“It is good land. They want to buy it. We have two lots, side by side, which they would buy.”
“How much are they worth?”
“I shall talk, and you shall only translate,” said Tommaso ponderously.
“Oh, all right! But do we get motored out, or do we have to take the street car?”
“They bring an auto here at ten o’clock. We go that way. Before that you shall go downtown and pay for the victrola.”
“I’ll do that, father. I’m glad we’re going to motor. And no flivver, I hope.”
She slid from the arm of the Morris chair, content with the interview. She was glad of the day, for it had brought her much knowledge.
It had taught her that Mrs. Barrington, whose husband owned real estate, could be worried by trifling matters. It had taught her that her own father also owned land. Not as much as Mr. Barrington, of course. But enough to permit thinking of the two men in the same thought.
She was glad that she had talked straight truths to Mrs. Barrington, as to an equal.
She had, moreover, scored strategically at her father’s home-coming. Enough, at least, to avoid that heavy-handed punishment which both Tommaso and Maria had been brought up to believe was a growing family’s salvation.
Although she would have liked it better to be called on to accompany her father on a day when it would have kept her out of school, she felt that the evening had been altogether successful.