16. THE LAST TRIP

n the summer of 1951, My father announced to the family that we would take a trip west. Our family rarely took vacations. A few years before, we had spent a week at Gill's Rock in Wisconsin. On another occasion, we traveled to Detroit to see some Falconarese living in that city: the Staffas, the Carnivales. We also visited Starved Rock, a state park several hours from Chicago, on a picnic. Our family traveled infrequently, mostly because of low family finances. The idea of journeying back to Falconara, which my sisters and I eventually would do together was inconceivable.

     But the cleaning and shoe repair store finally had begun to generate, well, at least modest profits. Pa and Ma also had few large expenses. Their mortgage payments were small. They were not given to the excesses of those who drink and party. We attended public schools. Pa and Ma accumulated $500, which they decided to spend on something they did not absolutely need: a month's vacation with the focus of the trip, Arizona.

     Arizona, with temperatures above 100 degrees, was hardly a destination most people would select in the summer. Our family, however, had reasons other than pleasure for traveling to that state. Tony and Gilberte lived in Mesa, just east of Phoenix. Uncle Angelo also lived there. Gill expected a baby in July. It was an old Albanian tradition, dating back past the time of Scanderbeg, that when a baby was expected within the tribe, members of that tribe would gather around the hearth, near where the mother would deliver. In the masculine-oriented Albanian tribal society, if the baby was male, everybody remained and celebrated, drinking until the next dawn; if the baby was female, they went home early.

     Our family certainly paid little attention to Albanian tribal rituals--but our heritage also was Italian, and the Italians also placed great emphasis on family. The birth of the first grandchild to Pa and Ma, the one who, being male, would carry the Musacchio name down through one more generation, certainly was an important event, not to be ignored just because 1,750 miles separated them from their son Tony, particularly not in this era of the automobile, when such a distance could be spanned in days, not months.

     Unknown to most members of the family, however, Pa was beginning to have more and more difficulty seeing. He had worn glasses for years. But increasingly now, he had difficulty focusing his eyes even with the help of glasses. Far objects had become a blur. Near objects were sometimes clear, sometimes not. When he tried to read anything, the letters seemed as though they had been printed with insufficient ink, an effect similar to typing with a worn print cartridge on your computer. The contrast between light and dark had begun to diminish, almost as though Pa were sitting in a theatre and a scrim, a net curtain, had been dropped across the proscenium between him and the performers. He could still distinguish colors, but there seemed to be less light. All of these effects on Pa's vision did not occur overnight, but rather over a period of many months. Whether or not my father realized it, he had begun to go blind.

     The cause was diabetes, an inherited disease common in the Musacchio family. The fact that Falconara was a small village in which intermarriage between the same families was both common and inevitable, certainly helped to concentrate the disease. Uncle Mike and Big Pa had diabetes, although only very late in life. Several of Uncle Gus's children had diabetes, including one with the same name as my father, Joe Musacchio. A bachelor, a gentle and friendly man, who we saw only at weddings and funerals, this Joe Musacchio would go blind in his fifties and die at the age of sixty in 1984.

     Diabetes is a disease of the pancreas, which normally produce a hormone called insulin. Insulin is essential in the body's conversion of food into energy. When a person eats, food is converted in the stomach into sugar, which is absorbed into the blood. That sugar passes through the blood stream and into the muscles where it is used as energy, fuel for the body's tasks.

     Insulin from the pancreas is essential, because it acts as a catalyst to store blood sugar in the muscles. Without insulin, blood sugar is eliminated through the urine. The body, thus, is unable to extract energy from food. The diabetic literally starves to death, despite how much he eats. Until the twentieth century, people who developed diabetes invariably died from the disease. Some diabetics can control their disease through a combination of diet and exercise, but many cannot. Only in 1922 did two Canadian scientists, Frederick G. Banting and Cherles H. Best, finally produce insulin through artificial means, which could be injected into the blood as a means of combating diabetes.

     Pa discovered that he was a diabetic in the mid-thirties while working for the Buda Steel Company in suburban Harvey. One day he fainted on the job, undoubtedly a result of low energy because of his body's inability to store blood sugar. A physician examined Pa and identified him as a diabetic. The company's response was simple: they fired him. Nevertheless, Pa learned to control his diabetes by taking shots of insulin, needle injected. He never learned to give shots to himself, but trusted Ma. Each morning before breakfast, Ma would inject her husband with a shot of insulin, and he would be all right for the rest of the day. My sisters and I winced at the thought of the needle plunging into our father's arms and usually managed to absent ourselves from the room during this scene, or at least look away. I used to suspect that on days when Ma, for whatever reason, was mad at Pa, she gave the needle an extra twist.

     As long as Pa received the proper insulin dosage each morning, he could work as hard and as long as any normal man. On occasion, however, he would begin to act strangely, walking as though drunk. The family knew they had to give him some orange juice with sugar to counteract what was an insulin reaction. His circulation was impaired. He had to make certain his feet were warm and well cared for, usually soaking them. He wore special shoes. If he developed any sores or cracks in the skin, they needed to be attended to promptly because of the danger of gangrene developing. Following an injury to Pa's arm, which resulted in severe swelling, one physician wanted to amputate the arm. Pa refused and the arm eventually recovered. Lack of proper circulation to the eyes was one cause for Pa's failing sight.

     Years later, we speculated that perhaps if he had been more careful with his diet, he might not have begun to suffer problems with his eyes. Pa loved his pasta. But even in the 1950s, so-called medical experts had only a fuzzy idea of the causes, and prevention, of diabetes. And why, other than the diminished circulation to certain parts of the body, it should affect the eyes.

     Whether or not Pa fully recognized the effect diabetes was having on his sight, he did realize that he could not expect to drive thousands of miles without some assistance, or at least backup in case he became sick. Ma could not drive, had no desire to learn. Pa had to turn to his three daughters. He designated me, the middle one, as his assistant driver. I balked, preferring to be chauffeured rather than do the chauffeuring. I didn't want to learn how to drive and said, "Why don't you teach Marion?"

     My father said, "No, I think you should learn first."

     "Pa, I don't want to drive."

     "You're going to learn," he stated, and that was that.

     I was not sure why her father would choose me to drive instead of my older sister. I suspected that my parents thought me more open than the others. Certainly I was more aggressive, the one with the most energy, who enjoyed teasing and tormenting my sisters, poking them, rumpling the paper when they tried to read the comics in bed on Sunday mornings. And perhaps I was the spoiled one of the family, the one given more opportunities. When I was seven, Uncle John and Zia had taken me to Hot Springs on the train and my sisters did not go. As a youngster, I was a cute little thing. Marion was quiet, very reserved. Beatrice was the youngest and inclined to allow her sisters to take the initiative. Several years later, I would be the only one of the three girls who decided to attend college. For whatever reason, I was selected to become the first driver in the family other than Pa.

     The following weekend, Pa and I drove to the Soldier Field parking lot, a favorite area for people learning to drive in Chicago. Soldier Field was the mammoth, horseshoe-shaped stadium on the lakefront just south of the Loop. South of the stadium, between the northbound lanes of Chicago's Outer Drive on one side and the southbound lanes on the other, was a massive stretch of concrete where the cars of the tens of thousands of spectators who flocked to Soldier Field for football games, boxing matches (Dempsey once fought there), auto races, and other events could be parked. Whenever there wasn't an event, particularly on weekends, the parking lot served as an obstacle-free training ground for beginning drivers.

     Our family then owned a four-door Buick, shining black, a fender that ran diagonally from front wheel to back, a chrome strip along the side, three portholes above it on the fender that signaled, to the knowledgeable, that this model had a six-cylinder engine, less costly than the eight-cylinder engines that went into Buick's most expensive models. Nevertheless, the Buick was a substantial investment for our family. Pa had purchased it new two years before.

     Arriving at the Soldier Field parking lot, Pa stopped the Buick and climbed out, indicating to me that I should take his place behind the wheel. "Pa, do I have to?" I pleaded, hopeful for a last-minute reprieve. By his stony stare, Pa indicated that my appeal had been rejected.

      For nearly an hour, I practiced driving, struggling to shift gears, worrying about other beginner drivers sharing the lot, fearful that if I got going too fast I would be unable to remember which of the pedals beneath my feet was the brake, and which the clutch in time to stop. Pa sat patiently in the seat beside me, trying to contain his own panic, attempting to suppress the urge to shout at me for my inability to master immediately the heavy black car. If the contrast between this task being practiced by his American daughter, a creature of Chicago, and the tasks practiced by girls the same age in the village of Falconara occurred to him, he gave no indication. Falconara, at that time, had no streets in which one could even drive a car. Goat carts and donkeys still were more common forms of transportation.

      We returned to Soldier Field on several successive weekends. Only after many revolutions of the parking lot did I finally begin to relax. At the end of one session, Pa announced, "All right, let's go home."

     "Good," sighed I and began to get out of the car.

     "No," he stopped me. "You're driving home."

     "Not on the Outer Drive."

     "Yes."

      I felt a wave of panic. "Pa, it's so busy."

      My father told me, "It's easier to drive on the Outer Drive than side streets."

     Pa assured me that sooner or later I would need to drive in traffic, that we could not get to Arizona circling the Soldier Field parking lot, and that the Outer Drive, with its wide lanes clearly delineated by white markers and with traffic moving orderly at a fairly constant speed, actually provided a gentler environment for a beginning driver than the side streets inside the city with their parked cars, stoplights, and a multitude of hazards.

     I remained unconvinced, but nevertheless guided the Buick along the Outer Drive and through Jackson Park to a point near 67th Street and Jeffrey Avenue, where the side streets began. Only then did Pa tell me that I was to drive the remainder of the way home through those streets. I arrived home at the wheel nervous, fatigued from my ordeal, and with the beginnings of a headache. But I had become a driver.

     To further improve my skills, Pa also enrolled me in a driver's education class. As time for the trip west approached, I looked forward to our vacation with anticipation of seeing part of America, but also with apprehension that I would at least partly be responsible for getting us safely across several thousand miles of countryside, and then back.

     Early on a hot and sunny Sunday morning in July, Our family made ready to head west. Along with our clothing packed in plain suitcases, Ma had brought a coffee pot which, in addition to brewing coffee, she would use to heat soup and cook hot dogs. Pa had a set of maps and route cards, which he had acquired from the Chicago Motor Club. Marked with wide yellow pen, the maps indicated the route we would follow, through Dubuque and Sioux Falls, Iowa and into South Dakota for a visit to Mount Rushmore, then across Wyoming and circling up through Billings, Montana, the way the Motor Club recommended to enter Yellowstone Park, next down south through Salt Lake City to turn west again to follow old U.S. 40 to San Francisco, finally south the length of California into Los Angeles, then heading back east to Arizona where we would arrive, hopefully, in time for the birth of Pa and Ma's first grandchild.

     The expectant grandparents sat in the front seat: Pa on the left behind the steering wheel, Ma to his right watching the scenery. We three girls sat in the back. I, as assistant driver also served as head navigator, and had charge of the maps and route cards. Bea, excited, if apprehensive, learned that even if she could not yet drive, she could back-seat drive and warn her father about what he should and should not do. Marion, nervous and just a bit angry, said little at the trip's outset. Marion was working for Chicago Title & Trust Company and had applied for two extra weeks past her usual two-week vacation. The company had refused, but Marion planned to spend the first two weeks, then wire her boss that she was sick and could not come back on time. Marion expected not to have a job when she returned, a necessary sacrifice she would make so as not to miss the family odyssey.

     But Marion mostly was angry because of an incident the previous night. Earlier in the week, one of her friends called and had asked if she would like to go out on a double date Saturday night. Because Marion knew the family was leaving early the next morning, she had first refused, but the friend talked her into it. When Marion's date, a college boy, appeared at the door that evening, she was shocked to see him wearing white buck shoes! Marion worried that someone in the neighborhood might see her going out with someone so dressed, Burnside not exactly being a neighborhood that appreciated college rah-rah. They had gone to Riverview Park, the north side amusement park, then stopped to eat. Marion had not particularly cared for her date. "He was a jerk," she would recall. "I couldn't wait to get home." It was 3:30 when he brought her to her door, barely hours before their trip was scheduled to begin. The door was locked, so the date rapidly fled in his white buck shoes while Marion knocked. Pa opened the door, then as soon as his daughter entered the living room, slapped her on the face for being so late. Marion would not speak to her father until the trip was halfway completed.

     The first night we stopped in Iowa at roadside lodgings. Transcontinental highway travel had only begun to become popular. Highways in the fifties remained mostly two-lane and concrete with Burma-Shave signs along the shoulders. They wound around the hills rather than cutting through them, skipping from town to town as though fearful that some chamber of commerce might be offended if bypassed. Motel chains, such as Holiday Inn, had not yet been developed. Four hundred miles in a day required a Herculean effort and a willingness to avoid long lunches. Still popular with travelers seeking lodging were multistory, in-city hotels. Motels were only beginning to develop on the edges of towns along the highways, and they were most often known as "tourist courts." Usually these courts consisted of a central office and a dozen or so separate, small cottages, each with a single bedroom, a bathroom, and maybe a kitchenette. Television sets? Only the rich owned them, certainly not owners of the tourist courts, at best Ma and Pa businesses. Air conditioning was almost unheard of, and, when available, would be a noisy window unit, not central air. Cost of these cottages

usually was well under $10 a night--or at least our family rarely paid more than that amount. We usually sought tourist courts that were low cost, but hopefully clean. The rooms, from one state to the other, invariably smelled the same, all the Ma and Pa owners undoubtedly using the same brand of disinfectant. The thought that a tourist court might also include in its amenities a swimming pool, a restaurant, and a night club featuring dance music had not yet occurred to anyone in the hotel industry. Even if it had, our family would not have been able to afford such lavish lodgings. Pa had brought with him $500, an enormous sum of money for a simple shoe repairman, but with that sum he would need to house and feed his family for an entire month while traveling thousands of miles. He carried the entire sum in cash, our family not believing in banks or checking accounts. Our bank back home was a mirror behind which Ma tucked money. When she traveled with dollar bills, like most of the other Falconarese women, she usually stuffed them in her bodice.

     Years later, my sisters and I would remember little about our stay in the Iowa tourist court except that the bed collapsed. Relaxing at the end of the day, we had been sitting on the bed that we would share. Pa and Ma had the second bed, and our mother had come over to sit on the bed beside us to talk. The weight of even four relatively slender women was too much for the aged frame and it collapsed, spilling us onto the floor. We laughed the rest of the night because of it.

     The next morning we rose at 4:00 to get an early start on the road. Our father's "early starts" were the bane of us three daughters, who would have appreciated an opportunity to sleep longer. But Pa wanted to get out on the road, before traffic got too heavy, before the temperature got too hot. He also had specific goals for each day. We had to reach Rapid City later that afternoon and could not waste time sleeping or fluttering around the room or prettying our hair. So many miles had to be covered each day. Should we, in the course of their day's travel, encounter something sightworthy beside the road ahead, we passed it hastily by. My father was not a man to react on instinct. No, he was a man with a plan, who, thanks to the Chicago Motor Club, knew exactly where he wanted to be each afternoon at 4:00, and barring something unexpected--a flat tire, an overheated radiator, a tornado--he was going to be there no matter how much the four women with him in the car complained.

     So we rose early and drove with few stops except for gasoline, always at a Phillips 66 station, because that was the brand of gasoline sold at the station at 87th Street and South Park used by Pa, and he saw no reason to switch brands now. If the women wanted to go to the bakowz or peeshkatoor (Arberesh words for toilet), they had better do so during one of these infrequent stops. There would be no pauses for lavish meals either. Ma had packed food for the trip and, only once a day, at noon, would we seek a shady grove near the side of the road where we could pull over to sip soup or drink coffee, which had been heated in the morning and placed in a thermos. Restaurants not only took time, but cost money. So we would stop and buy food in grocery stores, and Ma would make sandwiches, which we carried in an ice chest. We also ate fruit in the car, although the three of us had picked up the barbarian American habit of biting directly into certain fruit, unlike an Italian who would skillfully use a knife to peel loose the skin of an apple, peach, or pear.

     And we talked, about friends, and family, and where we were going, and what we would do when we got there, and sometimes, in a nostalgic mood, Ma would talk about Falconara. What the village was like: its sights, its sounds, its smells, the people there, tales about them, such as the time my grandfather Antonio came home to find his wife, Marianna, with two dead babies under the bed. Or the woman walking to obtain her dress for the wedding she didn't desire, letting down her hair to indicate she was going into mourning. (It would be only years later, when her girls grew older, that Ma would feel comfortable discussing with them some of the indiscretions of Chico, her father.)

     I later would not remember any specific time or place when the subject of the seven families came up, except we were together in the car for much of four weeks, hours at a time, day after day on roads that seemed to have no end, and I knows that my mother certainly discussed with us the legend, as Ma was wont to do from time to time over the years.

     Ma told the legend of our ancestors' first migration, how so many years ago, seven families had fled Albania. "These were royal families," insisted Ma.

     "Oh Ma, they couldn't have been," we would reply.

     "Well, I'm not sure they were royal," our mother would back down, "but at least maybe they were people of wealth. Important people. They were good people."

     Ma continued, talking about the way the town got its name, how the seven families had seen falcons circling over a tall rock that overlooked a beautiful valley. She told her daughters about how the people of the village had constructed a lovely church on the top of the rock, that they called the church the casteda. By now, Ma's eyes were moist with memories of the people she had left a quarter century before, including her parents. At the time of the trip her mother, Rosaria, was still alive. "Falconara was such a beautiful place," Ma would say.

     "Don't you want to go back, Ma?"

     "Other than to see my mother, no."

     "But wouldn't you like to at least see what Falconara is like now after all these years?"

     "Maybe just to see what it's like," admitted Ma. But I sensed that there appeared to be no great desire, no urgency in my mother's voice.

     My sisters and I did not know how much of our mother's tale to believe. We had abandoned our belief in Santa Claus, or his Italian equivalent, Babbo Natale, years ago. Even riding in a shiny, black Buick across the breadth of America, we found it difficult to believe that we had descended from nobility. Falconara, judging from the picture of the village on a post card sent them from relatives, hardly resembled King Arthur's Camelot, which was our vision of where noble people lived. My sisters and I thought it more likely that our Albanian ancestors had been thieves or rogues, and that was the reason they had to flee the country.

     Our mother also had been unable to tell us when the seven families had fled Albania. "A long time ago," Ma said. We suspected that the migration had occurred sometime in the previous century, maybe a few generations earlier, since didn't the family still speak the Albanian language? Even several years later, when I learned from my history teacher at Chicago Teachers College, Dr. Chada, that the Turkish invasion of the Balkans had occurred in the fifteenth century, I found it difficult to believe that the descendents of the seven families could have preserved their Albanian language for five centuries in a strange land. "Maybe our family left some time after the Turkish invasion," I speculated. Three decades more would pass before I would visit Falconara and see the map on the wall of the second floor of the municipio with its picture of the migration and the date 1476. Only then would I fully realize that the legend, passed on to my generation by my mother, as it had been passed down through generations before, as it is now being passed on to future generations, was essentially true.

     Thoughts of Falconara faded rapidly as we proceeded west. In South Dakota, I saw my first Indian. I was excited, although my mother, always concerned for the feelings of others, told me not to stare. We visited the Black Hills, the first mountains my sisters and I had seen. At Mount Rushmore, we stood in awe before the mammoth heads of the four great American presidents--George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, Abraham Lincoln and Theodore Roosevelt--carved from the side of a cliff. What would our Albanian ancestors have thought if presented with such a spectacle?

     We continued across America, Pa doing most of the driving, the three of us often leaning over the back seat trying to improve his driving technique. "Watch it, Pa," or, "Look out, Pa," we would shout. Later, I wondered how he tolerated us.

     When Pa got tired of our complaints, he would move from the wheel and let me drive, despite my complaints. I dreaded my stints behind the wheel. The tension at times was almost unbearable. Despite my inexperience, the others in the car felt more comfortable when I took the wheel.

     At that time, we had no idea that my father was going blind. In fact, I do not know if my mother knew either. It was hair-raising, because he would get tired, and he had problems with perception, and sometimes he would let the wheels slip off onto the shoulder or across the center line. We were traveling in the mountains where we were scared enough as it was. We would look down and think: one slip!

     Approaching the entrance to Yellowstone Park, no lodging was available. It was the middle of July, the height of the tourist season. All the tourist courts had "no vacancy" signs hung before them. The park lodge was already full, undoubtedly having been booked for months ahead. It had not occurred to my father, inexperienced in travel, that he would need to reserve a room in advance.

     I later would remember my father going to the office of one tourist court and asking for a room. The owner said, "There's nothing around."

     "I have to find something," said Pa.

     The owner simply could have shrugged off the problems of this family, which looked suspiciously foreign, but instead he made several telephone calls. He finally located an out-of-the-way lodge that had space. The room would cost $14 for night, well over our family budget, but Pa said we would take it.

     Only when we arrived at the entrance to the lodge did we realize how fancy it was. Our hearts sank. I recall being embarrassed. Too sensitive for my own good, I feared that the lodge owners would be unhappy at having agreed, over the telephone, to rent their luxurious and exclusive room to this family of such humble means.

     The woman at the sign-in desk nevertheless accepted the $14 payment for the room. "Did you want dinner?" she asked.

     Ma responded, "No, we've got our sandwiches." I hoped that a trapdoor would open beneath her feet and she could disappear from sight.

     "If you want to eat," said the woman, "you'll have to eat in the kitchen."

     We ate in the kitchen and afterwards ascended to our room, neat, clean, with a view across rolling fields of the mountains. In the evening, guests in the lodge sat around a fireplace on the main floor playing cards. Our family joined them. I continued to feel uncomfortable, as though we did not belong, even though an older girl came over and started to talk with me.

     The next morning we departed early, as usual. Pa wanted to get about the business of sightseeing in Yellowstone, so we could continue down the road. Before leaving, I actually made the bed we had slept in, because I did not want the lodge owners to think that my family was the kind who would leave a mess!

     From Yellowstone, we headed to California, stopping to pose for photographs beside the sign announcing the state line. We had a habit of jumping out of the car to take a picture every time we crossed into another state. To us, that was a big deal.

     We stopped that night at a tourist court owned by a young man who had moved recently from Illinois. He was trying to scratch out a living, but did not seem to be doing too well. The man's tourist court was rundown, but he was pleasant, stopping by our cottage to talk to us that evening. Early the next morning we crossed the Golden Gate bridge into San Francisco, the fog so thick that we could see little of the bridge's structure itself, much less the view west over the Pacific Ocean or east toward Alcatraz Island.

     Our next stop was Los Angeles, actually Cucamonga, a town east of the city made famous as a railroad stop oft called on the Jack Benny radio program, "...Anaheim, Azusa, and Cu-ca-monga." It was the location of the oldest winery in California. Living there were friends from the old country named Staffa. The Staffa family occupied an old frame home that had grape vines as well as other fruit trees and bushes in the back yard. During their stay, the Staffas took us to Griffith Observatory

     Pa's driving had begun to deteriorate. Driving through Los Angeles, he had turned from a side street toward the Pasadena Freeway. His sight uncertain, Pa began to enter the exit ramp. His three daughters in the back seat, ever backseat driving, shouted at him: "No Pa, no!"

     Leaving Los Angeles, we drove toward Phoenix, crossing the Mojave Desert in the hottest month of the year in the middle of the day. The only air conditioning in the Buick was the open window, but the rush of air that poured over them was hotter than 100 degrees. Later that afternoon we arrived where Tony lived in Arizona. The heat so bothered Bea, that soon after arriving, she fainted while taking a shower.

     Tony lived in Mesa, a small community on the eastern edge of Phoenix. Although within the next few decades, Mesa would grow to more than 150,000, it then contained only 5,000 people, most of them Mormons. Now part of the urban sprawl around Phoenix, Mesa in 1951 was isolated from the larger city by several miles of dessert, barren land without even cactus, only occasional clumps of low, scrub bushes.

     Along the main highway stretching to the east, Tony owned a tourist court along with Uncle Angelo. The tourist court was typical of those in which we had stayed for the rest of our journey through the west, neat but old, a dozen small white cottages, all smelling the same. None had air conditioning, but utilized coolers in the windows. There was a wooden structure in front that contained a foot-long hot dog stand. "Sandy's Hot Dogs," said the sign atop the structure, having been erected by a previous owner. In addition to hot dogs, Uncle Angelo supervised the sale of triple-decker hamburgers, milk shakes, and malts. Marion suspected her brother and Uncle Angelo made more money from the hot dog stand than they did from the motel. In the rear was a house rented to a family, one of whose children suffered from asthma. They had come to the southwest because of the dry, hot climate.

     In the early hours of morning, the day Pa and Ma arrived with their three girls, Gill had gone to the hospital with labor pains. The date was July 28, 1951. Ma rushed to join Gill at the hospital, staying with her in the room until the birth. It was a long, arduous delivery for tiny, slender Gill. She labored nineteen hours! Finally, at 9:20 in the evening, the child was literally tugged from his mother's womb. It was a boy, a large boy. The male Musacchio heir weighed nine pounds two-and-a-half ounces, was twenty-two inches long, and was both black and blue and covered with scratches from the forceps delivery. The nurses at the small Mesa hospital decided not to bother to place a name tag on the baby's wrist. "We won't have any trouble identifying him," they said.

     Tony wanted to name his son, in the Italian fashion, after his father, Joseph. Gill didn't want to offend her father back in France. They compromised on the name Andrew, with Anthony for a middle name. So the male heir was called Andrew Musacchio, ironically the same name as the oldest member of the family for whom we have a genealogical record: Andrea Muzaka, who lived in the year 1280.

     Following the birth, while Gill remained in the hospital, we headed north to the Grand Canyon, staying in a cabin near the south rim. The next day we drove toward Las Vegas, stopping to see Hoover Dam and Lake Mead. Despite the heat of the day, it was cold in the turbine rooms beneath the dam. Descending in the elevator, Pa began to act groggy. It was his diabetes. He had not eaten yet that day. After Ma handed him some food, he recovered quickly.

     This was before the creation of the Las Vegas strip of hotels and night clubs. The main gambling establishment in town was the Golden Nugget, which we visited. Marion, who as a working woman, had her own money, said, "Ma, I want to play one of those machines."

     A man standing nearby overheard and asked, "How old are you, miss?"    Marion replied, "I'm twenty."

     "Nope," said the man. "You're too young. Can't play."

     Marion thus was saved from contributing to the Nevada economy. We did not remain overnight in Las Vegas, but returned to Mesa. Gill was

out of the hospital, and we had a chance to see the baby one more time before beginning our return trip east.

     Pa planned no major stops on the way home, but he did have them directed on a slightly longer routing southward so as to see more of the country. We crossed Arizona and passed through New Mexico, entering Texas in El Paso, just skirting the border of Mexico. It would seem as though it took forever to cross Texas. Coming through one small town, a state policeman stopped our car. "You're going too fast," announced the policeman, although he did not issue us a ticket.

     Us three backseat drivers knew our father was going too fast. We had been shouting for him to slow down through most of the trip, particularly while traveling through the mountains. "Pa was a bit on the fast side," recalls Bea. "He made us all nervous."

     After the policeman returned to his squad car, Pa began driving again, still too fast. Soon the policeman was on their tail, siren screaming, red light flashing. "Mister, if you don't slow down," said the policeman, "I'm going to take you to jail."

     My sisters and I were relieved when our father tempered his pace leaving the town. We did not realize that, with his sight progressively deteriorating, he might have been experiencing difficulty reading the speedometer and did not realize how fast he was going. Coming into another town in Texas, he was headed toward a traffic island in the middle of the road before I shouted and alerted him. It was one more close call.

     But there were also funny times. Coming through Texas, Marion had rolled up one of the side windows in the back seat because the dust was more oppressive than the heat. Ma peeled an orange, then went to hurl it out the window, not realizing it was rolled up. The orange peels bounced off the glass and onto the floor. We laughed for the rest of the day because of that, including Ma, who normally liked to preserve an air of dignity.

      We finished our journey through Arkansas, Tennessee, Kentucky, and Indiana. We were home by August. The stress, however, told on us all. Marion returned to work at Chicago Title & Trust, relieved that she had not been fired. She had telegrammed from Arizona that she had gotten sick as an excuse to extend her vacation two more weeks, but now she suffered a gallbladder attack. I returned to Fenger for my senior year of high school, but within a few weeks came down with yellow jaundice, actually infectious hepatitis, a case so severe that my eyeballs turned yellow. Dr. Weimer suggested that I might have drunk some infected water, or eaten some infected food. For several weeks I had to stay in a dark room, since light bothered my eyes. I would remain home from school two months. Uncle John's grandson, John Molinaro, had just arrived in the United States from Italy, hoping to be able to stay. Johnny, as we called him to differentiate him from Uncle John, could speak very little English, but he visited often to keep me company, talking with me in the Arberesh dialect common to the Falconarese.

     One afternoon, my mother came into the room and hinted that Johnny, her second cousin, was a very nice boy and would I be interested in marrying him? I was dumbfounded. "Oh no," thought I. "Here I am a senior in high school, and the last thing I want is to get married, and certainly not to a guy just off the boat." I told my mother, "Ma, I don't love him." Ma nodded and did not raise the subject again. Perhaps prompted by Uncle John, she had been doing what mothers did in the old country: arrange marriages for their children. But Ma realized that many of the ways of the old country no longer worked in her adopted land.

      During visits to the home, Johnny worked with Pa in the back yard, erecting fences along the paths, measuring distances in precise detail. At first, Johnny could not understand the reason for all the measurements, then he realized that his grandfather's brother was going blind, that Pa was preparing himself for the day when he would lose his sight, arranging everything in and around the house so that he would be able to function as close to normal as before.

      In January, 1952, I graduated from high school and by that time my father was almost completely blind. He attended the graduation ceremony. Whether Pa could see anything of my graduation, I don't know, but I know he was proud of the education he was giving his children, particularly when I continued on to college.

      To those who made the trip west in the summer of 1951, it was not a vacation that would be remembered with great pleasure. The snapshots pasted in the family album--Pa looking at an antelope, Ma and the three of us sitting on the rim of the Grand Canyon, Old Faithful erupting, the carved heads at Mount Rushmore, numerous state line signs with various members of the family standing by smiling--only exhibit surface feelings. Despite the sights we saw, despite seeing our brother, despite the birth of the male Musacchio heir, the trip was too hurried, too frantic, too filled with tension, almost frightening. "Don't talk about it," Marion would snap when reminded of the trip. Bea felt the same: "Let's not say anything about that." It was not merely that our father was hurtling relentlessly into blindness, but that he seemed to be taking us with him. For years afterwards, my sisters would refuse to discuss the trip, shrugging off questions about it for this book with the reply that it was too uncomfortable a memory.

     And it was. It would only be many years later, when Pa was gone, and eventually Ma, that the three of us would realize that our father knew what he was doing that summer, that he knew he had to teach me how to drive, that he knew he would soon go blind, and that if he did not see his adopted country that summer he would never see it again.

Chapter 17 >

Falconara: A Family Odyssey

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