Carmella Commands/Chapter 5
armella had never taken school seriously. She was in the seventh grade, as befitted her age when considered in the light of her home opportunities. But many children in the room were older. A few, with Anglo-Saxon names, were younger. Carmella was the youngest of Italian birth or parentage.
The language held them back. In the rear seats were boys and girls of fourteen or fifteen, even one of sixteen, whose parents were planning to take her out and let her work in a factory after school closed. Some, like the sixteen-year-old girl, were dull. Some were unable to speak easily in English.
Carmella sat well forward. There were two reasons for this. One was her size. She was not tall for her age, but rather short and stocky. And Miss Kelly, the teacher, found it well to have Carmella easily in view. Whenever mischief was afoot, she had learned that Carmella was better kept in sight. The girl herself was rarely caught, but when the entire room began to grow turbulent and Carmella’s black eyes were snapping and laughing, though her face was solemn as at church, Miss Kelly’s instinct was to connect the two. Once she yielded to her impulse.
“Carmella, come here!” she commanded, at a moment when Carmella seemed the only well-behaved child in the room.
The surprised Carmella went forward.
“Go and stand in the corner!” said Miss Kelly.
“But, Miss Kelly⸺” began the victim of discipline.
“Go and stand in the corner!” repeated Miss Kelly firmly.
Carmella obeyed, and the sudden peace that brooded over the entire forty children confirmed Miss Kelly’s instinct.
The school was overwhelmingly Italian. Most of the children, like Carmella, talked one or another dialect of Italian in their homes. In the school itself Italian was forbidden. They even played their games at recess in English, except when some one hit some one else and was sworn at in Italian.
Mr. Carroll, the principal, sensed the need for stressing English in his classrooms, and definitely ignored the supposedly well-balanced curriculum laid down by the school board and superintendent. In consequence, his school stood lowest in the uniform examinations. But he was content, knowing that his first duty to his charges lay in seeing that they talked the language of their country.
“And,” he told the superintendent, when this problem had been in debate between them, “think of having a President of the United States who talked with a foreign twang, just because I didn’t make the teachers drill them in English, over and over.”
The superintendent had smiled, and Mr. Carroll’s methods were not questioned further. Occasionally the parents of Anglo-Saxon origin complained, but for political reasons their complaints never reached far, and now and then some such child was quietly transferred to another school, if the complaints were vigorous enough.
Carmella would have reveled in the English lessons of her schoolday, except that the bigger children in the rear seats kept the business of learning in too elementary a stage. She was forever asking Miss Kelly questions about words and sentences. But the other studies found her uninterested and careless.
Just now, in geography, they were studying South America. Carmella recited the highly important characteristics of Ecuador without enthusiasm. Mostly she had them wrong. She was more interested in arranging a pin so that it would stick into Salvatore, the boy in front, when he sat back, than in the whole vast problem of the future welfare of Ecuador.
But this morning, the day after the real estate negotiations in Greendale, Carmella suddenly turned herself with almost a ferocity of interest toward another study—arithmetic. Early in the forenoon she raised her hand, waving it madly until Miss Kelly responded.
“Miss Kelly,” said Carmella, standing by her desk while the other children wondered what new mischief was coming, “Miss Kelly, will you please say to us what is the most important study we study?”
Surprised, Miss Kelly nevertheless answered promptly:
“English. Language is the pathway to all the things we are interested in, you know.”
“Yes, Miss Kelly. And what is the next best study, please?”
This time Miss Kelly thought longer. Finally, she replied:
“It is hard to tell that, Carmella. Perhaps it is civics. Perhaps it is arithmetic. Yes, I believe the next most important study is arithmetic.”
Carmella smiled happily.
“That is what I hoped you would say, Miss Kelly. Please, could we study more arithmetic and less Ecuador?”
“We must study what is good for us, Carmella,” said Miss Kelly. “And so we must study geography and other things as well as arithmetic and English.”
But to herself the puzzled teacher was wondering why in the world these children of alien parents, whose problem of problems it was to know their city and state and country, to know American ways and American ideals, should be expected to learn why and wherein Ecuador differed from Peru or Chile. English first, of course. And arithmetic was necessary and international. Unconsciously that day she cut short the South American lesson to turn to the rules of percentage. And she noted with interest that Carmella devoted herself to figures as never before.
“Somebody’s cheated her out of a dime,” thought Miss Kelly, little dreaming that Carmella was dreaming in terms of thousands of dollars.
What the girl was, in fact, dreaming at the time was less dream than nightmare. Her father had set four thousand dollars as his price. She had heard the Americans say that Mr. Barrington would pay up to double the value. Yet they had offered nothing like twice Tommaso’s figure.
Her opinion, after an afternoon and night of feverish worry, was that they had been commissioned to buy up to a certain sum, and were trying to pay less in order to pocket the difference. This theory presupposed that her father had named a price in fair proportion to value. She believed that Tommaso would do that.
And yet⸺
It swept over her in sudden tremors that he might have added all the possible profit for himself, before setting his figure. In which case all her dreams of sudden prosperity were void, and life held nothing but horror for her. Yet always, after a trembling spell, her thoughts came back to the secure belief that her father was not American enough for that.
If he had said four thousand, believing that the property was worth it, then she believed that her position would yet be secure. If not⸺
Then she could run away from home. Other girls had.
Whatever happened, it interested her vastly just then to study arithmetic, which suddenly appeared to her to be a science of much utility.
On arriving home from school that afternoon, calmer of spirit and pleased with the sense of richness that a new interest inspires, she was surprised to find a message asking her to go to Hope House again.
She had not expected it, and yet—deep in her heart she had known that she would see Mrs. Barrington again soon. The message said Miss Sargle wished to see her, but Carmella would not have responded had she not been certain that Miss Sargle was merely acting for Mrs. Barrington.
First Carmella asked Maria. The latter hesitated, but yielded to the look of queer pleading in her daughter’s dancing eyes.
“I’m glad you could come, Kate,” said Mrs. Barrington, as Carmella entered. “I wanted to talk to you.”
“Yes, Mrs. Barrington.”
“You know you said the other day that I was ‘high hat.’”
“Yes, Mrs. Barrington.”
“But you were called away before you explained it. Of course I know something of what you mean. But you can help me further if you will, Kate. And I want your help very much.”
“Yes, Mrs. Barrington.”
“Take your own mother now. How was I ‘high hat’ to her?”
“I don’t know, Mrs. Barrington.”
“Yet you know that I was, in some way?”
“My mother, she did not like it. Other women, they do not like it.”
“But,” said Mrs. Barrington, honestly bewildered, “don’t they want to be helped?”
Carmella, who had been sitting opposite Mrs. Barrington, jumped to her feet and planted them far apart, like a sailor on a choppy sea. Her careful selfrestraint blazed into sudden wrath.
“‘Help!’” she cried. “Help? What help? You try to teach my mother what she already knows. You teach her! Teach her? You can’t teach my mother. She could teach you.
“She don’t know maybe American. But she knows to sew. She knows lace. Yes! She could teach you. Why don’t you learn something? Why don’t you learn to make lace? Why don’t you let my mother help you? She knows, my mother does.
“Why you always sit and think you do fine job when you just come and sit and smile—and smile down to us? My mother she could teach you lace in return for you teach her American. But you! Ho-ho! You think you know all. You think we know nothing. You smile down.
“Am-er-i-can-i-za-tion!” Carmella pronounced the word as if she were spelling it. “Be damn!” she added.
For a moment Mrs. Barrington was stunned by this outbreak. She looked at the small, defiant figure, thinking blurred thoughts of immediate annihilation. Never, so far as she knew, had any human being dared to speak to her like that. Her own children—she started as she thought of them in contrast to this strange creature of Little Italy.
Margaret, thirteen. Just Carmella’s age. Margaret was willful, but original—never! And John, aged fifteen. He rarely obeyed. But neither did he verbally rebel. He merely walked a sullen way of his own. For a brief, bewildered instant Mrs. Barrington wished that she too had a child who could speak like that, and who could be taught not to.
Carmella, too, was thinking. She panted in her excitement, like the winner of a hurdle race. Quickly she was ashamed, and she was frightened. Was not Mrs. Barrington the wife of the man who wanted her father’s land? She had meant to be diplomatic.
Keenly she realized that it was her task to straighten out the real estate situation before her father learned that she had betrayed him. Yet she did not want to broach any such subject to the sponsor of the sewing class. In a vague way she realized that this would hurt, rather than help, her plight. But she wanted to be in touch with the Barrington family. And now she had spoiled it all by this outbreak. Mrs. Barrington interrupted her racing thoughts.
“Carmella,” she began, her poise recovered and again smiling, “tell me how to get your mother interested in the class once more.”
“Santo Dio, Mrs. Barrington, don’t smile like that,” said Carmella.
“What!” Mrs. Barrington was again startled out of her composure.
“Don’t smile,” repeated Carmella. “Look friendly instead.”
Mrs. Barrington’s face was that of Mona Lisa being scolded in front of the class.
“But, Carmella⸺” she began.
“You say the class is for the women,” went on Carmella, like a ruthless rhyme. “But you boss it. You smile down and boss it. Stop smile and stop boss! My mother, she good as you. Some ways she’s better. Not so much American, but more lace. Excuse me, please, but I got thing to do back home. Good-bye, Mrs. Barrington!”
“Wait a minute!” pleaded the sponsor, still suffering from a form of verbal shell-shock. “Would your mother come to the class if I asked her to teach me to make lace?”
“Maybe! I don’t know. Maybe, if you act as if you really want to learn instead of pretend to, and do not smile so high hat.”
“Will you ask her, Kate?”
“Sure!” said Carmella, now in the doorway, struggling to make her escape.
“Then please tell her that I want to learn. I really do. And Kate⸺” Mrs. Barrington had a sudden inspiration. Her Margaret might gain by seeing America in the making. Even John might learn that to be young and different need not mean to be sullen.
“Kate, I’d like it ever so much if you would come over to my house some day for luncheon. Will you? Please?”
Carmella turned in amazement. Here was a note in Mrs. Barrington’s voice that she had never heard before. Never had she heard it in the voice of any American who was speaking to her. It rang true.
Even in trying to buy her father’s land for less than it was worth—she hoped—neither Mr. Richmond nor Mr. Hastings had used that tone. They had been—well, high hat. And then they had been angry. Mrs. Barrington had turned from something that was high hat to something that was not that, and yet was not angry. It was something that thrilled Carmella. It sounded like human being to human being.
“I’d like to, Mrs. Barrington,” answered Carmella. “Gee! I would like to. But I gotta ask my mother. And she⸺”
“Could you come tomorrow?” asked Mrs. Barrington, adding: “If your mother is willing.”
“School’s tomorrow.”
“Of course! How careless of me! There wouldn’t be time. Then can you come Saturday?”
“I’ll ask mother.”
“Then let’s drive around and ask mother now.”
Mrs. Barrington had had the happiest inspiration of her social career. She knew that Carmella was in a dubious mood. For a moment, she was friendly. Driving around to the yellow cottage to ask mother would clinch the matter. Long years afterwards, when Carmella Coletta was a figure in the world, she thought back to this moment and patterned her conduct by it. At the time, the keenness of it escaped her. Her mind was on real estate deals, anyway.
Mrs. Barrington started toward the door with Carmella. Her sedan was waiting outside, and the welltrained Dixon showed no slight trace of surprise as his employer came out with the Italian girl of Doty Street.
Doty Street was having thrills. Two days ago, a splendid touring car, with two prosperous-looking men, had stopped at the Coletta cottage. Today, a heavy sedan, with uniformed chauffeur, stopped at the same yellow gate. And each time Carmella, Tommaso’s kid, had emerged in state.
Mrs. Alibrio, next door, regretted that she had refused to lend her patent egg-beater to Maria when the latter’s had broken last week. She resolved to be more neighborly. Even if Mrs. Coletta did come from Naples and she from Sicily. After all, were not Italians Italians, whatever region they came from? Mussolini was teaching that. Mussolini, thought Mrs. Alibrio, peering through the curtains of her front windows, was a wise, wise man.
Carmella asked Mrs. Barrington into the house, with all the politeness of a Doge’s palace. But the latter declined pleasantly, remembering not to smile.
“You just run in and ask your mother about Saturday,” she said. “I’ve an appointment, and must hurry on.”
Mrs. Barrington’s appointment was with herself. Carmella dashed into the house, breathless.
“May I go? May I go? Say I can! Say so, please, mammuzza!” she urged, after explaining her errand.
“Maybe I should ask your father?” said Maria slowly, doubting her own ears.
“Sure you should,” agreed Carmella. “And if he says so, I can go, I can go?”
Maria nodded, and Carmella dashed back to the sedan.
“Thank you ever so much, Mrs. Barrington, and mother says I can go. She says to thank you. What time shall I come?”
“I’ll send the machine for you,” said Mrs. Barrington, smiling and then suddenly ceasing to smile.
“About twelve-thirty. Dixon, remember the place. I want you to stop here for Kate on Saturday at twelve-thirty.”
“Yes, ma’am,” said Dixon, and bestowed on Carmella a hearty wink.
The car moved off, leaving Carmella on the sidewalk.
Such a machine!
Such a chauffeur!
Such wonders!
And Mrs. Barrington! She rather was liking Mrs. Barrington. She rather liked Mrs. Barrington’s chauffeur.