Carmella Commands
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,
[36]
