# Carmella Commands/Chapter 26

he next evening, after supper, Tommaso settled himself in his chair with his pipe, and called Carmella to him. It was Saturday, and all day she had been with him and Dixon, out near Greendale, on a new contract.
Tommaso had noticed that his partner was teaching the girl to drive the small automobile which their business now warranted, for errand-running in and out of town. She would be old enough for a driver’s license soon.
She responded to her father’s call by curling on the arm of his chair, and he put his arm around her. Although this was the usual hour for his lesson in English, he began to speak in Italian.
“You like Dixon?” he asked abruptly.
“Surely, padre! He is a wonderful man. I’m going to marry him some day.”
Tommaso nearly lost the pipe from his mouth in his surprise. He closed his teeth on it, and smoked in silence for a few minutes, hoping not to betray his emotion. Finally he spoke:
“But not till you ﬁnish school, carissima.”
​“No, not until I ﬁnish school. But sometime.”
“Dixon is a ﬁne man, that is true.”
“I’m glad you think so, padre. Then you want me to marry him?”
“We shall see. We shall see.”
“I hope you’ll like it, because I’m going to do it.”
“Does he want you, little one?”
“He will. I even think he does now, a little.”
Tommaso smiled.
“Now to teach me to speak the English,” he said, reﬂecting that it was her teaching that had enabled him to discuss her with Dixon the night before. He took pride in the interview.
Dixon, on his part, knew well that he was in love with Carmella—in love with her as a child; in love with the woman he felt sure she would be. Moreover, she was already approaching the age when it was not uncommon for girls of Little Italy to marry. There were many brides of sixteen, though it meant bewildered parental visits to the license bureau.
Dixon, however, had no such intention. He himself was slightly over twenty-one; he would be twenty-ﬁve when Carmella ﬁnished high school. He intended that she should have those years in school while he was establishing himself as a business man.
Meanwhile, Tommaso’s answer had given him the right to feel like an older brother—the right to help her when he could.
Before school opened that autumn Carmella had ​learned to operate the machine, and as a driver had won even Dixon’s critical praise. He had taught her that careful driving was more to be desired than skillful chance taking. Once, when she had been reckless, he refused to let her touch the wheel for a week. After that, she obeyed.
He had been afraid about that—afraid it would cost him her goodwill. He would have been staggered had he known that few things had ever given her a greater thrill, and that she had boasted about it to Tommaso.
“You see, padre mio,” she had said. “He is a man to be trusted. You need have no fear in giving me to him.”
“We shall see, when the time comes,” replied her father.
“When the time comes, you will be glad to have such a man want your Carmella,” she said.
Her entrance to high school was an event. She was absorbed by the opening vista of new knowledge. And for some reason she could not fathom, she felt a new and lively interest in learning. She felt like a conqueror over every lesson.
At home, the family conversation gradually came to “be more and more in English. Maria, now frankly letting Carmella help her with words and sentences, was able to speak the new tongue far better than her husband. But also she was more sensitive to ridicule.
Little Enrico was inclined to laugh at some of his mother’s errors. But, laughing once too often and ​more loudly than was wise, he was disciplined by his father in a way that cured him for all time.
“Mrs. Barrington, she weesh see you, Carmella,” said Maria one night in the early winter.
“What does she want?”
“I not know. She ask me that I tell you. She at Hope House after school domani.”
“Wants me to be a Girl Scout, I’ll bet.”
“Not the Scout. She said tell you it.”
Carmella chuckled. Evidently Mrs. Barrington remembered. Carmella’s ﬁrst thought was to refuse to go. But life was branching out. Perhaps it would be interesting.
The next afternoon found her facing Mrs. Barrington once more in the latter’s oﬀice in the settlement house.
“How do you do, Kid Kate!” said Mrs. Barrington, extending her hand.
Carmella accepted it doubtfully and answered:
“Very well, thank you. How’s your chauﬀeur?”
“Bless me! He’s all right, I think.” Mrs. Barrington was once more out of poise for an instant. In some fashion Carmella, while staying within the bounds of surface politeness, always managed to irritate her.
For an instant she was tempted to send the girl away. But Miss Sargle had impressed on her the importance of this interview.
​“I’ve a very good chauﬀeur now,” she said. “How is Dixon, by the way? I hear he’s with your father.”
“Dixon’s ﬁne. Making more money now than he ever could as chauﬀeur, and I’m going to marry him.”
“Marry him! Bless my soul! Why, Kate, you’re only a child.”
“When I ﬁnish school I’ll be nineteen.”
“Oh-h!”
For a moment Mrs. Barrington sat and stared. Then she said:
“Has he asked you to?”
“Oh, no, but he will when I ﬁnish school.”
Mrs. Barrington was bewildered. This modern generation! Her own Margaret was having strange ideas, but none like this.
“That’s very nice, I’m sure,” she said at last. “But now I want to talk to you about something else. How would you like to be assistant to Miss Sargle here at Hope House?”
Carmella stared in turn. This was a new vista. She was accustomed to responsibility, but here was more than she had foreseen.
“But I go to school,” she protested.
“Of course. And you’d keep on going. This wouldn’t take you out of school at all. Miss Sargle needs more help than she has. You could come over two or three afternoons a week, after school, and then help in the Tuesday and Friday evening classes, and be here all day Saturday.”
​“Gee!” exclaimed Carmella.
Behind this oﬀer was more than the girl knew. Hope House, frankly, was not going very well. Few mothers were interested, and children were dropping out. Those who still came would not behave. Miss Sargle herself lacked the human touch.
In looking about for a helper who could really help, Miss Sargle had remembered Carmella. The girl had always been a leader. In her anxiety—which was in reality an anxiety to retain her position—Miss Sargle had visited Principal Carroll of the grammar school Carmella had attended.
“She’d be your ideal!” he replied promptly. “She can whip her weight in wildcats. And what’s more, she does it.”
He recounted a playground incident when Carmella had soundly punished a group of quarreling children.
“The funny part of it was,” he went on, “that she didn’t make enemies of them. She’s got personality. In all my experience, I never saw a youngster her age with so much of it. Get her, and your troubles with other children are over, even if she licks them all the ﬁrst week.”
Miss Sargle had urged Carmella on Mrs. Barrington with almost suspicious earnestness.
“You understand,” Mrs. Barrington continued, “that this would be paid for. You’d have a salary.”
Carmella’s eyes shone.
“How much?” she demanded.
​“Well, of course we haven’t any too much money. But I think we could pay you ﬁfteen dollars a week.”
Mentally, Carmella tumbled from her chair. Mentally, she turned a handspring. Mentally, she fainted. Fifteen dollars a week! For bossing a few kids!
“I’ll come,” she said.
“Splendid! And when can you begin?”
“Now.”
“That’s nice! This is Tuesday. Could you come this evening?”
“Sure! That is, I suppose I can. If dad will let me. I’ll have to ask him, of course. What time will I begin?”
“About seven-thirty. Now suppose you go in and talk with Miss Sargle about the work.”
It proved that Miss Sargle didn’t know exactly what she wanted Carmella to do. She wanted results, but the methods she couldn’t describe. She rambled in her discussion of the problem till Carmella cut her short:
“What you really want, Miss Sargle, is more kids, more interest, and better behaved. Is that right?”
“Well—yes!”
“All right! You’ll get ’em, all three. I may have to beat up a few kids, but they’ll be here and they’ll mind.
“You see, Miss Sargle, the trouble with you is you don’t know kids and you don’t know wops. All you know is what you learned out of a book. That’s the bunk. You gotta get down to cases and know folks. ​I’ll pull this thing through, but you gotta do what I say. If I tell you to kiss a dirty wop kid, you kiss him. See? I’ll tell you why afterwards.”
After Carmella had two-stepped home—for that is what she did—Miss Sargle sat for a long, long time at her desk, thinking. And the thinking she did just then was perhaps the longest educational step she had ever taken.
Carmella could hardly control her joy. She was to be an executive—a boss. Dearly did she love to boss. Her standing with her family and her friends was certain to rise. And—Dixon!
Maria and Tommaso listened to her story.
“I do not know this Hope House,” said Tommaso. He looked across at his wife. And so slightly that the keen-eyed Carmella did not see, Maria nodded. She knew Hope House. Her heart was high with pride that her daughter had been asked to help manage it.
“All right, Carmella,” said Tommaso. “When do you begin?”
“Tonight.”
Tommaso laughed.
Dixon did not call at the cottage for several evenings. When he did, it was on one of Carmella’s nights at Hope House. She was putting on her coat when he arrived. Breathlessly she explained her new work to him, and announced the pay with a ﬂourish.
“Bully for you, kid!” said Dixon. “But listen! ​Don’t get so interested in this up-up stuﬀ that you forget—well, you know, other things.”
Carmella laughed joyously.
“Anybody that has to be uplifted isn’t worth it,” she said. “These damn Americanizationers make me sick. I’m through with this job the day I ﬁnish school. I’m making money now, and not hurting myself. But I’m never going to forget that I’m a member of the ﬁrm—or going to be.”
Dixon restrained his impulse to take her in his arms.
But⸺
All the way to Hope House Carmella felt as if she had been thus seized and held. And she loved the feeling.
After Dixon had gone away, Maria sat on the arm of Tommaso’s chair, and spoke of the pay that Carmella was to have.
“It is not too much,” said Tommaso.
“N-no!” admitted Maria. Though privately she was bewildered at the sum. “But now she shall buy her own clothes, is it not so?”
Tommaso puﬀed his pipe in long silence. Then:
“She shall put her money in the bank for the time. It is I who shall pay for what she needs while she is a child. Thank God I can!”
“But she earns so much,” urged Maria.
“Not too much! Remember, wife of mine, that our daughter knows much. She is worth much. And this is America. She gets what she is worth.”
​“But so much money!”
“She shall put her money in the bank for the time when she is a wife and when she is a mother.”
“Whose wife?” asked Maria.
“You know, carissima.”
And Maria, who never before had done such a thing, laughed a hearty American laugh.
The End