# Carmella Commands/Chapter 10

ich beyond experience with her ten-dollar bill, Carmella was folding her written excuse for absence and preparing to hurry to the afternoon session of school when a whistle sounded outside. It was the code that she and Nicolo Pieri had arranged, and she jumped to the door. Nicolo stood in her gateway, lighting a cigarette.
“Hello, kid!” he said gruﬀly. “Dated up with any of your ﬂossy friends for this afternoon?”
“Got to go to school,” she said. “I was out this morning, interpreting for dad.”
“School!” said Nicolo contemptuously. “That’s for when you ain’t got any other place to go. Listen, kid! I got two dollars to spend. Let’s do the movies, and a dance place and a coupla sodas. How about it?”
A few hours ago two dollars for an afternoon’s spending would have dazzled Carmella. But with ten dollars of her own in her tiny purse, to do with as she wished, the eﬀect that Nicolo had expected was not quite achieved. She did not mention the ten dollars, however.
​“Gosh, I’ve got to go to school some, haven’t I? I’ll get the dickens from dad if I get reported.”
“Old Carroll never’ll report you. I know him. Hell! I used to get away with two days a week the year before I was sixteen. Besides, you don’t let your old man use the rough stuﬀ any more, do you?”
“When my dad starts to lick you bet you stand for it—a lot of it. Of course, I don’t let mother lick me any more.”
“All applesauce!” said Nicolo. “My mother she ain’t tried to touch me since dad got killed. She’s got old country ideas, m’ mother has, but she knows enough not to try ’em on me.”
“But you’re sixteen,” said Carmella, with some slight tone of awe in her voice.
“Well, you’re thirteen, ain’t you? And you do your dad’s interpreting. What’s the big idea? Afraid to sign up with John Hancock and all them independence guys?”
“I’m as independent as you are,” cried Carmella hotly. “And I’ll be a damn sight more independent than you when I’m sixteen.”
“L-i-k-e hell!” said Nicolo, drawling the “like” in the way which is peculiarly maddening to second generations.
“Are you gonna go with me or are you gonna stick with teacher?” he added tauntingly. “Remember, I got two passports in my pockets.”
“Say,” asked Carmella, “where’d you get your little ​old two doodles? You haven’t had as much solid wealth as that since you were christened—not to spend in one afternoon, anyway.”
“I gotta job now.”
“A job! What at?”
“I’m workin’ regular for Mike now.”
“For Mike Laudini?”
Nicolo nodded, noting the impression he had made.
“Secante!” exclaimed Carmella, and then, as if that did not quite ﬁll the needs of the occasion, she added: “Per la madonna!”
Fascinated, she gazed at her newly crowned friend. She knew that he had been occasionally employed by Mike—errands and such triﬂes. But to be regularly employed, and learning the mysteries of bootlegging—here was honor. She could hardly believe that she had known him when he was only a slouchy boy.
Nicolo tossed his cigarette into the roadway with nonchalance, and lit another, striking the match with an air. It was his moment of glory.
“Let’s go to the movies, Nick,” said the girl.
“Sure you ain’t got to go to school and kiss the teacher?” he asked.
For answer Carmella swung wide and hard a t the boy’s face, a blow which he easily sidestepped. They both laughed.
“What you doing for Mike?” she asked, as they started down the street, toward the school building and toward the theater.
​“Well, I’m helping him make his vermouth and gin, so far,” answered Nicolo. “But he’s going to put me on deliveries in a few days.”
Carmella gazed in rapture. Making deliveries, she knew, was the last word in bootlegging honors. It put you in touch with people, real people, big people, people like Mr. Barrington. You got tips on where to buy real estate. As for the mixing, it was a matter of pride to Doty Street that Mike had so many vermouth customers. That meant, of course, that they served cocktails for dinner—real cocktails, not the denatured kind. Not every bootlegger in Little Italy had customers for vermouth.
They went to two movies, with a soda after each, and then to a dance hall. Carmella was an instinctive dancer, with all the feeling for rhythm and the sense of lying back on the music, as on a cloud, that dancing can mean. Nicolo had to count his steps, sometimes audibly. Mostly he preferred to do a corner foxtrot, scarcely moving beyond the conﬁnes of a square yard. Carmella loved the gliding long-step movement about the ﬂoor.
Once a patron tipped the orchestra leader to play a waltz. He played it very badly, of course, as modern orchestras do, and was in desperate need of a metronome. But still it was a waltz. Nicolo tried it in terms of the foxtrot, and stumbled. Carmella, who had never danced a waltz before, stopped short and absorbed the rhythm. Suddenly she seized Nicolo, and ​led him through the dance as if she had been a dancingschool pupil in the nineties.
“What the hell!” growled Nicolo. “That ain’t no dance.”
“It’s a grand and glorious dance,” said Carmella, “and I wish they’d play it again.”
Carmella grew up as for the ﬁrst time she danced the waltz. As the music slowed down and drawled itself to a close, which is the way with modern orchestras, Carmella applauded frantically. Nicolo stood quietly.
“Clap, you boob!” cried Carmella.
“Aw, that was dumb stuﬀ,” he answered.
“That,” said Carmella, “was dancing. None of this shuﬀle stuﬀ. I didn’t know they made music that way. Go up and ask the leader to do it again.”
“Aw!” said Nicolo.
“I mean it. I gotta dance that dance some more. You go up and ask him to repeat or I’m oﬀ you. And that ain’t maybe.”
Nicolo looked Carmella in the eye and saw that she meant it. He shuﬀled slowly toward the orchestra, spoke a moment with the leader, and returned.
“He says he can’t do it more’n once an afternoon,” Nicolo reported.
“Well, for the love of glory, didn’t you tip him?” asked Carmella.
“Tip him? What with? I only had two dollars. I got twenty cents left.”
“Listen, Nick!’ Carmella led him to one side of ​the dance hall. “I simply gotta dance that again.” She took out her purse and handed him the ten-dollar bill her father had given her.
“Listen!” she repeated. “You go on out to the candy counter and get me some gum. Five cents’ worth. That’ll give you a bunch of bills. Make ’em give you a two-spot. That’ll be enough. Then you’ll walk up to that orchestra and slip the two-spot to the leader and tell him to play that dance again. I simply have got to do it.”
Carmella drawled the last sentence like a society leader.
Nicolo stared.
“Where’d you get this money?” he asked.
“Never you mind,” she answered. “Maybe I’m making money faster than you. You do what I say.”
She sat down while Nicolo walked to the foyer, bought the gum, and got his change. The attendant gave him a ﬁve-dollar bill and four ones, besides the silver. Nicolo passed back two ones.
“Give me a two-spot for that,” he said.
“Reckon you ain’t superstitious,” said the attendant, making the exchange. “Most of our customers won’t take a two-spot.”
“Neither would I, except for something special,” answered Nicolo.
He showed the bill to Carmella, as he gave her back her money.
“That’s great,” she said. “Now do your stuﬀ.”
​The orchestra was playing at the time, so that Nicolo waited. When the dance ended, he shuﬀled forward again, though with more conﬁdence in his gait this time. To the leader he said, holding out the bill.
“Listen, brother, I gotta young dame here that’s simply gotta have that dance again. Here’s something for ya to do it again.”
He turned and walked back. As he reached Carmella’s side the orchestra began again the opening notes of the Campus Dreams waltz.
Carmella jumped to her feet with a cry of delight.
“You did it! You did it!” she exclaimed.
“Two dollars did it,” said Nicolo.
Again Carmella directed Nicolo’s awkward feet through the steps of the greatest of college waltzes. And again she grew up.
“That’s dancing!” Carmella repeated, as the waltz came to an end.
“Aw, the heck!” said Nicolo.
As they walked home, chattering, Carmella was reﬂecting on the mental standing of a boy who preferred a foxtrot to a waltz. By the time they reached Doty Street, she had decided that his standing was low.
The next morning, on reaching school, she oﬀered her excuse for the absence of the day before. It had occurred to her that, with rare foresight, she had written “today” instead of “this morning.” And her father ​had signed it. Her absence of the afternoon was fully covered.
Mr. Carroll, the principal, often sent word to the homes of his pupils that his Carmellas and Salvatores and Marys and Angelos must not be kept out of school too often. And as often as he sent them he knew they would do no good.
The chief business of the oldest child in the families from which his pupils came was to be interpreter. What he and his staﬀ could teach them between times was clear gain for America. Perhaps! Mr. Carroll hoped so.
Rarely, indeed, did he report cases to the Attendance Department, which within a year or so had succeeded the old-fashioned truant oﬀicer. He knew how easily an unwilling child could refuse to learn. And, as he talked the problem over with Mrs. Carroll in the evenings, he wondered if they did not learn more as masterful interpreters than as submissive pupils.
Mr. Carroll had occupied himself more with the humanity that each term spread before him than with winning a Ph.D. based on the number of commas in a classic.
Carmella handed the excuse to Miss Kelly.
Miss Kelly scolded her and sent her to the principal. Carmella was growing entirely too free-and-easy in her absences.
“I want you to see Mr. Carroll about this,” said Miss Kelly.
​“Yes, Miss Kelly!” said Carmella.
Mr. Carroll read the excuse. Then he looked through his glasses at Carmella. He had decided to probe some of these facile documents.
“Why were you translating?” he asked.
“Because dad can’t talk English enough to do business,” said the girl.
“What was the business?”
“Selling real estate out in Greendale.”
“What time of day did the transaction take place?”
“We left the city at eleven-thirty,” answered Carmella.
“Then why”—Mr. Carroll was suddenly stern—“didn’t you come to school for the ﬁrst two hours?”
“Because you’d have made a row over my getting excused at eleven, and you know it, Mr. Carroll.”
The surprised principal took oﬀ his reading glasses and stared at Carmella.
“You know it,” she repeated.
“Are you sure I would?” he asked.
“Well, Miss Kelly would, anyway. And I simply had to be there, Mr. Carroll. You don’t know⸺”
“I know,” he said reassuringly. “But you’ve been away a good deal this term.”
“Have I, Mr. Carroll?” she asked.
For answer he turned to a card index. Gravely he read to her the dates on which she had been absent. There were more than Carmella remembered.
“Well, gosh, Mr. Carroll,” she said, “when your ​dad and your mother tell you they got to use you, what are you going to do?”
“When they tell you to do a thing, do it,” said the principal. “But I wish you would tell them that your main job is to come to school. They can keep you out now and then, but not as much as this record shows. Will you tell them?”
“Yes, Mr. Carroll,” said Carmella.
“And will you be at school every day except when they need you, instead of going to the movies as you did yesterday afternoon with Nicolo Pieri?”
Carmella’s jaw dropped, and she stared at the principal, trying to think who could have been the traitor.
“What do you mean, Mr. Carroll?” she asked.
“I mean, will you come to school instead of going to the movies?” he replied.
“Yes, Mr. Carroll,” said Carmella.
She walked back to her room, thinking furiously who could have told on her.
“Mr. Carroll sent me back,” she told Miss Kelly.
“And are you coming to school every day?” asked Miss Kelly.
“Every day that Mr. Carroll won’t take an excuse for.”
“But you’ll try to come regularly?”
“Yes, Miss Kelly,” said Carmella.