# Carmella Commands/Chapter 19

armella had insisted that her father install a telephone in the house.
“Nobody ever got to be big business without a phone,” she argued.
And then, as he hesitated:
“Suppose Mr. Barrington should want to call you.”
Tommaso was surprised to discover how much the instrument eased his aﬀairs, and he became proﬁcient in its use when talking to his countrymen. When English was necessary, Carmella translated, putting in his calls for him.
She was the undisputed proprietor of the instrument. It was understood that, whenever the bell rang, she should answer. Maria, frankly afraid, never touched it.
The family was at dinner one noon when the telephone sounded. Carmella rushed to the instrument.
“Hello!” she said.
“O-oh!” and she caught her breath. “Listen, I’ll call you about two o’clock.”
Maria, understanding some of the words, kept silent. ​She was not yet ready to reveal her knowledge of English.
Before school that afternoon, Carmella telephoned to the Barrington home. To reach Dixon was a matter of convincing the butler.
“Hello, Mr. Dixon!” she said. “I can talk now. I’m on a pay station phone. “What was that you were asking?”
Then⸺
“Oh, Mr. Dixon, what a lark!”
Then a ﬁnal direction:
“Not in sight of school. Mr. Carroll might see.”
A quarter of an hour later she joined him, around the corner.
“Where’d you like to go?” asked Dixon, as she jumped into the car.
“Anywhere in the world but Doty Street and Greendale. Drive me through the swell parts of the city, will you? I never really did see it all.”
For two hours Dixon drove her through the newer and ﬁner residential streets, avoiding only the section near the Barrington house. He knew the names of the owners of most of the ﬁner houses, and Carmella made him tell them all. Once she had him drive around the block and twice past a house that particularly took her fancy.
Carmella sat absorbed, and Dixon would have been surprised had he known what a remarkably good record she could have made in an examination on the ​subject afterwards. She had a ﬂair for learning what she wished to know.
Then into the suburbs. Here, with fewer houses, their talk became more general. The movies, for instance. Did Dixon like them? It seemed that he did, particularly feature ﬁlms with a lot of ﬁghting in them.
“Don’t you adore love stories?” she asked.
“Not the silly ones,” he said.
“There aren’t any silly love stories—not if they’re real ones.”
Dixon laughed so brutally that she was oﬀended.
“There’s only one actress I can stand in the love stuﬀ,” he ﬁnally explained, “and that’s because I get such a laugh out of it, because I used to know her.”
“You know a movie actress?” Carmella was suddenly aquiver.
“Not now! But Peggy Dorr and I used to go to school together in Iowa.”
“Peggy Dorr!”
Carmella’s exclamation was ecstatic.
“Sure! She was a measly-faced kid in the ﬁfth grade. She’s changed some since her name was Stella Krumpenheimer. Or else she buys her face at a darned good drug store.”
“Mr. Dixon, I don’t think that’s nice. Why, Peggy Dorr is my very most favorite actress. Doesn’t she love just wonderful!”
“That’s what gives me the big kick,” said Dixon ​placidly. “She used to be the tag end of nothing with the boys. We wouldn’t look at her, she was so dumb.”
Carmella was silent. Apparently she had lost interest, and made no answer when Dixon spoke. At last she said:
“Mr. Dixon, I know why Peggy Dorr loves so awfully swell.”
“Shoot!” said he. “I’ll keep the secret.”
“It’s because when you and the other boys knew her you didn’t love her. And she kept thinking about it, and wondering why not, and how she could make you love her. And she thought it out. That’s why she’s such a wonderful actress now. She thought it out.”
“Maybe that’s an idea. Maybe I could collect royalties from her now, for helping to make her a big actress.”
“Why?” asked Carmella, sceptically.
“For just what you said. For not loving her on sight, so she’d have to think it out.”
“Mr. Dixon,” said Carmella sternly, “I think you’re simply horrid.”
“Well, gosh, kid! How was I to know she was going to grow into one of the grandest little eyeartists in Hollywood? All she was then was a wobblykneed kid that always looked like she was going to be sick tomorrow.”
“Would she know you now?” asked Carmella abruptly.
​“Far be it from me to say. Probably not. They do say these ﬁlm stars shake everybody that knew ’em when they was kids. Still, Stella—I mean Peggy—might remember the red-head who washed her face in snow so hard she told the teacher.”
“Did you wash Peggy Dorr’s face in snow?” There was awe in the question.
“I sure did, worse luck!”
“Why worse luck?”
“Because the teacher told the principal, and I got licked.”
“Peggy Dorr got you licked?”
“I’ll say she did.”
“Weren’t you proud?”
“Huh! Remember, kid, she was Stella Krumpenheimer then.”
Carmella sighed.
“Say, kid,” he went on, “how’d you like to see a Peggy picture some evening, when I’m oﬀ? I promise not to laugh.”
“Oh, I’d love to,” the girl answered eagerly.
As Dixon drove her toward Doty Street they were busy devising a code by which he could telephone her, and she could answer without revealing her message to her assembled family.
Carmella entered the house, hearing trouble inside as the door opened. Maria was scolding Giuseppe, while the boy sulked. Carmella tiptoed to where she ​could overhear. To a threat of physical punishment, she heard him exclaim, in English:
“Aw, dad’s too tired to do any licking when he gets home now.”
For answer Maria seized him by the shoulder and marched him, slightly struggling, into the bedroom which, since Carmella could remember, had been the place of family discipline.
Listening intently, Carmella wondered. For years her mother had taken no part in such scenes, leaving the whippings to Tommaso. This was a new development, together with her apparent understanding of some of Giuseppe’s English. Was it possible that there was some connection between the two phenomena?
Soon she heard her brother frantically promising to be good, and presently he emerged, sniﬀling, followed by his mother.
Twice that evening, after the younger children had gone to bed, Carmella spoke to her mother in English. But each time Maria told her to repeat in “the” language. She was not yet ready for the real test of her new and growing knowledge.
Carmella was mystiﬁed. Nor was this feeling less- ened as she noted that her mother was developing a new poise. It seemed that her family might be worth new study; it was becoming something more than a background for her other interests.
Twice her father and mother, evidently by agree​ment, refused to allow her to go to the movies with Nicolo. She met the latter one morning, as she was on her way to school.
“Say,” he began, “what’s the works?”
“It’s past me, Nick,” said Carmella, ﬂushing.
“Dad’s got a grouch, I reckon. But believe me, when he says anything, it’s SO.”
“Aw, gosh! Listen, I can get away tonight. Are you with me? You can pretend to study with Amelia. See?”
For the sake of her self-respect Carmella consented. Prejudice among today’s youth against parental control is especially strong among the foreign-born. Descendants of the Mayﬂower group, who think they have trouble with their sons and daughters, know nothing whatever about it.
As they rose from table that evening, Carmella said to her mother:
“Can Giuseppe wash the dishes? Miss Silva says we’ve got to learn more history. I told Amelia I’d study it with her. She’s just plain dumb.”
And before her mother could answer, she had gone. Down the street she met the waiting Nicolo.
“So you made it this time,” said he, more sneeringly than she liked.
It started the evening wrong. Through the two-hour show Carmella found the hand-holding and the conversation slightly forced. She was disgusted by the “Western” that Nicolo applauded so heartily. The ​society drama introduced only one setting and a frock or two that she felt added to her social knowledge. And the “love stuﬀ,” as Dixon had called it, was undeniably ﬂat.
Carmella suddenly realized that she was criticizing in terms of Dixon’s point of view. These love scenes, she was sure, would disgust him. But Dixon’s disgust would be more reﬁned than Nicolo’s. His would have at least a share of humor. Nicolo’s was merely the intolerance of ignorance.
Her silence, as they walked home, led Nicolo to ask:
“Getting high hat since your dad made his ten strike in the digging department?”
“You,” said Carmella quietly, “can go to hell.” Instantly the boy was contrite.
“You don’t mean you don’t like me any more?” he pleaded.
“Sure I like you. But I’d like you a darn sight better if you’d stop thinking it was smart not to try to grow up.”
“For the love of Pete, kid, say it again. I don’t get you.”
“You’ve got all kinds of chances, Nick, and you don’t improve,” explained Carmella patiently. “You don’t try to. I bet I couldn’t carry hooch into all the best houses and not learn a darn thing, like you don’t.
“You think it’s smart to be rough and tough, Nick,” ​she went on. “Well, maybe it is. But I’m on the other track. I think it’s smart to learn something.”
“Mike don’t have to learn nothing,” said Nicolo gruﬀly. “Yet lots of the damn high hatters are mighty glad to know Mike—after dark.”
“My friends ain’t going to be after-dark friends,” said Carmella crisply.