Carmella Commands
“Perhaps,” agreed the teacher. But to herself she added:
“My soul and conscience! ‘Us Americans’!”
Later she repeated the conversation to Mr. Carroll, adding:
“But she does keep ahead of her class, in spite of her absences.”
“If she’s doing that, all right,” said the wise principal. “I hear the boys telling how her father is becoming a big man in Little Italy, and if she interprets for him, fine! Our job is to see that these kids learn American, before they learn arithmetic or anything else. It’s funny how the parents won’t learn the language they live in. Yet they get along all right. Rich in ten years, some of ’em.”
“I hear her father has a fleet of trucks and hundreds of men working for him.”
“And I’ve heard he drives his own Studebaker. It’s a great world. All I can drive is a Chev.”
Carmella heard the same exaggerations in the schoolyard, and was determined not to sail under false standards.
“My dad,” she declared, “hires his trucks and has only twenty-five men.”
“Ye-ah! But he works for the Barrington man, doesn’t he?” demanded one shrewd boy of fifteen, who in class never could tell whether Argentina was a place in Africa or the man who discovered the Northwest passage, if any.
[200]
