# Carmella Commands/Chapter 2

ow do you do, Carmella?” said Mrs. Bar­rington, appraising the sturdy little black-­haired picture of self-­conﬁdence at a glance, quite as she had appraised social leaders through recent years. Or so she thought. She might learn later that her trained inventory had over­looked some few factors that were outside her own reactions.
“I’m very well, thank you, Mrs. Barrington,” an­swered Carmella quietly. “How do you do, Mrs. Barrington?”
A deep reader of racial riddles would try to interpret deeply the slight—the very slight emphasis on Car­mella’s “you” as she asked after Mrs. Barrington’s health. But the deep reader would be wrong. It was not even symbolic, save as the child herself sym­bolized a swift decade dieted in a faster school of life than Mrs. Barrington’s forty-­one years could match.
Carmella, to put it simply, was merely trying to be polite—which to her meant returning whatever seemed to her to be tit for whatever seemed to her to be tat. It is an old, old rule.
​Mrs. Barrington had been—well, perhaps she had been a triﬂe overgracious in her question. Carmella, by instinct as fundamental as the ﬁrst step in civiliza­tion, was perhaps a triﬂe overcasual in reply.
Mrs. Barrington, as it happened, did not notice the very slight emphasis.
“Very well, thank you, Carmella, ” she said.
“That’s good,” said Carmella, still struggling with her social formulas. “It’s been a beautiful day, hasn’t it?”
“Y-e-e-e-s!” admitted Mrs. Barrington, beginning to be more observant. “A very beautiful day,” she added, after a pause that may have denoted a revised mental measurement.
And then, for a moment, Mrs. Barrington and Miss Carmella Coletta forgot the rules. They simply stood and stared.
Mrs. Barrington, daughter of all the daughters of all the necessary ancestors in American history.
Carmella Coletta, daughter of an immigrant who at that moment could not talk English, and was swear­ing at a shoveler in rich Italian. Yet, perhaps, de­scendant of kings who ruled when Nero was merely a maternal hope. Yet, also perhaps, not.
The diﬀerence was chieﬂy that Mrs. Barrington knew and cared, whereas Carmella did not know and did not care. She would not even have known what to care about had she been told to sit still for ﬁve min­utes and worry. ​Mrs. Barrington smiled graciously at well­-regulated intervals. Sometimes a fraction too graciously, but her own world rarely measured half­tones. Carmella smiled easily and contagiously. Often her eyes smiled when her lips did not—a puzzling sort of smile that lures conﬁdence but repels familiarity.
Two strong souls looked through each other’s front windows for a moment. Neither could turn a corner in the other’s house. But at least they saw past the entrance.
Carmella had never heard of Kipling, and Mrs. Bar­rington had long since forgotten him as of no immedi­ate conversational value. The two lived perhaps four miles from each other, across the city. But there was neither East nor West, though they came from the ends of the earth.
“Carmella,” began Mrs. Barrington, recovering ﬁrst from the mutual study⸺
“Mrs. Barrington,” Carmella interrupted, “please call me Kate.”
“Why— why—ye-es—of course. But isn’t your name Carmella?”
“Sure it is—my dago name. But it’s wop—wop—wop. So help me Santo Dio, Mrs. Barrington, I get so damn’ sick⸺”
“Carmella, you’re swearing!”
“Yes’m! I’m trying to. I get so damn’ sick of this wop stuﬀ. You can’t imagine! My name, when I get to be an American, is going to be Catherine. But ​of course I’m a kid, so it has to be Kate. So, if you don’t mind⸺”
“Kid Kate!” murmured Mrs. Barrington, thinking aloud.
“Yes’m! Kid Kate. Anything but that Carmella stuﬀ. I get that at home.”
“But Carmella is a beautiful name,” suggested Mrs. Barrington.
The girl stood squarely gazing, but did not answer. “And you never told Miss Sargle to call you Kate, did you, Carmella?”
“Oh—her! Buon Dio, no!”
“But why not?”
“Perchè? Because she’d ask me why and argue me, and ask m’ mother why, and write down a ﬁgure in a book. She’s all rules. She’s dumb. She wouldn’t know—the way you do, Mrs. Barrington.”
“I see.”
Mrs. Barrington was silent for a moment. Waiting to be sure that she wholly did see. Waiting to value Carmella’s verdict on her own possible virtues. Then, suddenly, she came to the reason for the interview.
“Let’s sit down, Kate. I want to ask you a ques­ tion. You know we have a sewing class here at Hope House. Your mother, they tell me, makes beautiful lace. But she doesn’t come any more.”
“What of it?” demanded Carmella. “Lots of other girls’ mothers don’t.”
“Mrs. Barrington, Please Call Me Kate”
​“That’s true. But I want to ﬁnd out why. Why doesn’t your mother come, Kate?”
“Is there a law that she has to?”
“Of course not! But I should think she’d like to.”
“That’s the bunk!” said Carmella. “She don’t have to. She don’t like to. Why should she?”
“But why doesn’t she want to, Kate?”
“She speaks not the English.”
“But—we have some one here who speaks Italian. Mrs. Scalzo would talk to her. And most of the other women talk Italian more than they do English.”
“Yes,” admitted Carmella.
“Then why doesn’t she want to, Kate?”
Carmella wriggled with eagerness to tell. The eagerness of youth possessed of knowledge for which an adult is seeking. But a reticence the native rarely fathoms held her back—the reticence of caution in a strange world. She sat and stared, totally silent.
Suddenly Mrs. Barrington laughed. The altogether happy laugh of one who has solved a secret.
“Carmella Kid Kate!” she exclaimed. “You’re afraid of me. You’re afraid to tell. You’re afraid of me, and I’m just Mrs. Barrington.”
“Afraid nothing!” exclaimed Carmella, as instinc­tively as she would have met a taunt in the schoolyard at recess. “You think I’m afraid of you? Sure you’re Mrs. Barrington. And what’s that? I’m Car­mella Coletta, and I’m private secretary of the Coletta​⸺” she hesitated for the word— “the Coletta Construction Company. Afraid!”
“What do you construct, Kate?”
“Cellars,” answered the girl deﬁantly.
“Wonderful!” exclaimed Mrs. Barrington. “You, or your father?”
Carmella laughed in turn—quite the equal of Mrs. Barrington’s—plus the added sincerity of thirteen years as compared with forty-one.
“Dad, of course! Dad’s the Construction part of it. He’s a whiz at that. Any time you want any cellars built, ask dad. But I’m the Company of it. When it comes to talking or writing, dad’s a dud. That’s where I come in. I’m the goods when it comes to the English part.”
“So I judged,” said Mrs. Barrington, smiling.
Her social instinct, synchronized to situations, told her that this was the moment. She went on quickly.
“But tell me, Kate, now that you trust me, why doesn’t your mother come to the sewing class?”
“Mother, or all the other women?”
Mrs. Barrington ﬂushed slightly. Carmella’s perceptions were disconcerting.
“Your mother and other women,” she admitted.
Carmella gazed long and keenly at Mrs. Barrington, so long and so keenly that the latter was again almost embarrassed. Finally the girl spoke:
“You really want to know?”
“I really do, Kate.”
​“Even if it hurts your feelings?”
“Even if it hurts my feelings.”
“Then I’ll tell you. You’re high hat with them.”
At this particular moment Miss Sargle had to step to the door. It was Miss Sargle’s misfortune that she always interrupted at the wrong moment. Like the habit of attempting dramatic entrances, only to stumble over the rug. There is no getting over it.
“Carmella’s brother is here for her,” said Miss Sargle.
Without waiting for further introduction, the girl’s ten-year-old brother darted into the room.
“Quick, kid!” he cried, speaking in Italian for greater privacy from these American women. “Mother wants you to come home right away, to speak English. She’s mad at you for coming over without asking.”
“Cops?” asked Carmella.
“No, no! A man asking questions. Mother wants you.”
“All right. You run and tell her I’ll be right over. Run like the devil, or we’ll both catch it. Tell her I’ll be right over.”
“You’ll catch it anyway,” retorted Joe. “She’s mad.”
As her brother started away, Carmella turned to Mrs. Barrington and explained, in English:
“Mother wants me, to talk English for her. She gets panicky when I ain’t around and anybody comes. ​Damn these languages anyway! Why don’t they all talk Italian? Good-bye, Mrs. Barrington.”
“But, Kate, just a minute!”
Mrs. Barrington was deﬁnitely annoyed at the interruption, just as the key to the problem was being given her. In her own well-ordered home interruptions did not happen. She felt like discharging Miss Sargle on the spot, with two weeks’ pay and no reference.
“What do you mean about my being high hat with your mother?” she went on quickly.
Carmella turned in the doorway, emerging from the middle of Miss Sargle, into whom she had plunged in the process of hasty departure. Miss Sargle had lingered fascinated. She was far less bewildered by the collision than by discovering a Carmella who talked freely and scandalously with Mrs. Barrington. With herself, Carmella had invariably been reserved and most exemplary. Here, she sensed, was another step in her postgraduate education.
Poised on one foot, Carmella turned to Mrs. Barrington and half shouted:
“You know what high hat is, don’t you? You think you’re better than us folks. Better than m’ mother. You talk down to ’em. You smile down to ’em. My mother ain’t going to make lace for you to smile down to her about. It’s better lace than you could make yourself. A whole heap better. Get me?”
“But, Kate⸺” pleaded Mrs. Barrington, now in real distress. She knew that never again could she ​get Carmella into this mood of high and heart-rending frankness.
“I answered your question, and I gotta go, and go quick. I gotta go. Good-bye, Mrs. Barrington!”
The interview’s ﬁnal touch of courtesy was Carmella’s, descendant possibly of ancient kings; descendant surely of a civilization that was older than that of Hope House. Miss Sargle breathed heavily and hurried to her own oﬀice before Mrs. Barrington could speak.
Carmella, as she ﬂed, was appalled at her own boldness. She ran from what had happened as well as to answer her mother’s summons. Her sturdy legs bore her swiftly down the street as Mrs. Barrington looked through the window after her. Much more swiftly than she had come Carmella was going.
Mrs. Barrington sat down to think over an entirely new notion.
“High hat,” indeed!
And what exactly, she wondered to herself, was high hat? She had heard her own Margaret use the phrase, too. Evidently it was something that ran through all the social layers. And it might be an idea worth considering.
Was it by any chance that settlement work was handicapped by this high hatting? Her thought turned again to the Ashcroft Circle. Was it the same instinct that had caused the newcoming juniors to ​form their League and defy the established order? Was the world such a medley of monotonous motives?
But there were so many ways of “smiling down,” as Carmella had called it. How, in particular, had she oﬀended Carmella’s mother? Or the other women who no longer came to the sewing class?
She hadn’t done it! She knew she hadn’t. Her work was as altruistic as, for example, her friendship for Mrs. Whitman Russell, wife of the president of the Central Trust Company, on whose invitation she was here in Hope House.
And yet— Carmella had been positive. A most positive youngster! With remarkable eyes and a remarkable smile. And—bless Mrs. Barrington’s highly pedigreed soul for admitting it—Carmella had spoken as one having authority.
How much authority of knowledge had she? Mrs. Barrington wondered. Her wondering continued as she left Hope House and entered her waiting car to be driven from the old east end slowly through the business district to the newer west side.
“Dixon,” she suddenly asked of the chauﬀeur, “did anybody ever ‘smile down’ at you?”
“I beg pardon, ma’am?” said Dixon.
Mrs. Barrington repeated the question, whereupon Dixon drove in silence for some moments, pondering. At last he answered.
“If I know what you mean, ma’am, yes!”
“Who?”’
​“Well, ma’am, for one there was that Italian girl that came racing out of the house a few minutes before you came out. She did it, I reckon.”
“Who? Kid Kate? I don’t mean that sort of thing. She’s a child. And besides, she doesn’t know you. I mean somebody who smiles down—you know—from above.”
“Mostly the people who tip you do that, Mrs. Barrington,” said Dixon.
“Oh, I see! And do you like it, Dixon?”
“If they tip big enough, I can stand it, as long as I’m driving. But when I get through⸺”
“You mean you’re not going to be a chauﬀeur always?”
“Not always, ma’am. Of course not.”
“Then what are you going to do?”
“Get into a job that grows, ma’am.”
“I see. And then?”
“Nobody’s going to tip me, ma’am. I’ll charge ’em and they’ll pay. And if they act superior, I’m going to tell ’em to go to hell. I beg pardon, Mrs. Barrington. That slipped out.”
“All right! That’s all right, Dixon. I see what you mean.”
It was Mrs. Barrington’s ﬁrst attempt to learn from her chauﬀeur. She sat in silence, trying to ﬁgure how much she had learned. Suddenly she remembered, with a hot-ﬂushing face, that Mrs. Whitman Russell had “smiled down” to her—on her, Mrs. Barrington​–when the subject of sponsoring the sewing class had ﬁrst been mentioned.
“The cat!” exclaimed Mrs. Barrington to herself. And sank into a corner of the sedan to think and to grow furious.