14. BEING DIFFERENT

n the first half of the twentieth century, the United States of America was considered the great melting pot. Everybody wanted to be the same. Americans--meaning anyone whose family had arrived in the country more than one generation earlier--did not tolerate well differences among others. Foreigners were looked down upon as inferior. There was very little--if any--pride in what toward the end of the century would be looked upon warmly as "ethnic." When Joe and Ledda began to create a home for their family on the south side of Chicago, Italians held a position very low on the ethnic totem pole. Pizza had not yet been embraced as almost a native American dish. Spaghetti was something only poor people ate, and nobody would think of referring to it as "pasta," or think that it might be something you would eat before an athletic contest. Blacks and Hispanics had not yet migrated northward in large numbers to raise the Italians in status by moving beneath them on the pole.

     As we grew to maturity, my sisters and I became uncomfortably aware that we were unlike their neighbors, that we were part not merely of two cultures, but three. Marion, Bea and I had been born in America, conversed in English without accents, yet we also were Italo-Albanians, who spoke a peculiar Arberesh dialect in our home that not even our supposed Italian paisano countrymen could comprehend. We dealt with one culture on the outside and another culture on the inside of the house, and that sometimes caused a conflict. We really felt different, and there were times when people made fun of us.

     One reason why my family felt more isolated was that we were among the first to move out of Grand Crossing Park. Grand Crossing had been mostly Italian, thus provided a comfortable, sheltered environment for those who had not yet been assimilated, or who did not want to be assimilated, into mainstream America. The Burnside neighborhood into which my parents moved when they bought the house at 87th and St. Lawrence was mostly first- and second-generation Irish and Polish, nearest us, with a large Hungarian community somewhat further south beyond 91st. About that same time, a few other Falconarese also settled in Burnside: the Nescis, the Ristuccis, the Manesses, the Formosas and others. Across 87th to the north, however, was a totally different neighborhood, a more prosperous one: Chesterfield, more typically American.

     I wanted to be part of mainstream America, but to do so, I had to compromise between the two cultures. I felt I compromised more than my sisters, Marion and Bea. Our brother Tony almost existed in another world, partly because he was male, mostly because he was born eleven years before three girls arrived in rapid succession.

     My sisters and I often felt embarrassed when we appeared in public with our parents, who would speak to us in the Arberesh dialect. Sensitive, I worried about being thought of as "foreign." Since my parents also understood English, I once said, "Why don't you talk English instead of Albanian when we're out?"

     Yet when the three of us went somewhere together, particularly after we grew older, we often would hold conversations in public, speaking Arberesh so people around us could not understand what we were saying. It was our "secret," our defense against an American society perceived as hostile. If we saw a good-looking boy on the street car, we would talk shamelessly about him, confident that he couldn't understand. Though embarrassed at being different, we also reveled in it.

     Our parents also looked different. My father Joe Musacchio was neither as dark nor as swarthy as most Italian men, so he "passed" more easily than my mother. Having arrived in the United States as a teenager, Pa also spoke English with less accent than Ma, who arrived fifteen years later, aged thirty-two, more formed in her ways.

     Ma was very dark, having the olive-colored skin common among Mediterranean people. She had jet black hair, which she still braided and wound around her head in the manner of the women of Falconara. Not many people wore their hair that way. Her mode of dress also seemed foreign, or so I thought, not stylish in the manner of the mothers of the more typically American friends I would make at school. Yet my mother would not pierce our ears, as other foreign women did, because she said that the Americans didn't wear pierced earrings. At least not then.

     I recall one day hurting my mother. It was just before my wedding to Hal. His mother was first-generation Irish, her parents having come

over in steerage from the old country. Hal’s father was from Kentucky, his predecessors from the hills of Appalachia. Although comfortable financially, they had not had easy childhoods. Nevertheless, Hal was an American, perceived as part and parcel of the culture into which I felt my family should aspire. After my father lifted our house, creating a basement beneath, we ate most of our meals there. I said one day to her mother: "They," meaning the Higdons, "would never eat supper in the basement." I was right too; Hal and his parents lived in an apartment and never ate supper in the basement, because they didn't have any. As an apartment dweller, Hal claimed he always had envied his classmates who lived in houses. Thus, to children, the grass always seemed greener on the other side of the fence. Only later would they learn it was not necessarily greener, just different.

     On one occasion during my engagement to Hal, he was sick, undoubtedly with the flu or some such ailment. My mother, hospitable person that she was, sent me and my sister Bea to the Higdon’s apartment with a gift, not for Hal but for his parents, common practice in Falconara. The gift was a

bottle of homemade wine. Hal’s parents rarely, if ever, drank wine. His father drank ale; his mother, in the best Irish traditions, had a fondness for whiskey. I felt uncomfortable presenting home-made wine to Hal’s father. I recall retreating rapidly, embarrassed, still the victim of cultural gap.

     My mother was older than most of the mothers of my classmates, another factor that made the Musacchios different. She had given birth to Marion at age thirty-six, me at age forty, Beatrice at forty-one. But Ma was oh-so-typical of many American mothers in her ambitions for her children, her desire to both protect them and see that their lives were happier than she felt hers was. If her girls harbored desires to shed their differences, to blend into American society, then she would assist. In coming to America, Ma had turned her back on Falconara. She knew that--even though it was not entirely her own choice--she would probably never return to the mountainous village where she was born and raised. "My mother talked a lot about Falconara," my sister Bea would recall. "I don't think she liked it." Falconara was past; America was both present and future. Although Ma felt that the standards of the society she had left were, in many respects, superior to those of the at times crude society into which she had been thrust, she would do everything in her power to make her children good Americans. Because my mother was basically good, she would succeed.

When Ledda arrived in America, joining Joe in Grand Crossing, Tony attended Cornell grammar school. Most of his classmates were Italian, but he was a Falconarese who had as much difficulty speaking their language as he did speaking English. Tony frequently had to fight to defend himself. The other children often made fun of his clothing, mostly hand-me-downs, which had been patched and repaired by my mother.

      After we had moved into the house on 87th Street, Ma sent Tony to Burnside elementary school, five blocks south at 91st Place and St. Lawrence. He went there for two years. His classmates were Irish, Polish, Hungarians, tough people, so my mother thought. Tony survived, even thrived, in this environment. He became one of the best pitchers on the neighborhood baseball team and later played that typically American

sport while attending Hirsch High School, being captain of the team. Tony's success in baseball was among the high points of his life, I later would realize.

     My mother, however, worried about sending her three daughters into that difficult, ethnic environment, filled with people only marginally better off than themselves. Then, within a few years after their move into Burnside, the city constructed a new elementary school four blocks to the north at 83rd and St. Lawrence. It was called Dixon. The neighborhood Dixon was built to serve, Chesterfield, might have been considered middle class by any normal sociological standard, but by the standards of our family, it was definitely upper class, its people refined and cultured, living in impressive, one-family homes, or in ritzy three-story apartment buildings. This was the end of the rainbow. The majority of the people in Chesterfield were WASP, white anglo-saxon protestant (although that term had not yet been coined). Most of the others in the neighborhood were Jewish, people with money who spent their winters in Florida. Surely, Ma felt, her children could receive a better education at this newly constructed school among children with better cultural backgrounds.

     Even though my mother stressed tolerance and said everybody was equal, in some respects she was sort of a snob when it came to certain areas. One of those areas was education. My parents respected education more than many other families, and she felt Burnside wasn't good enough for us.

     The only obstacle was that our family lived on the wrong side of the tracks, those tracks being the street car tracks that ran east and west along 87th Street, a main artery. Chicago is divided logically into equal-sized blocks, roughly eight blocks to the mile, a major arterial street every eighth block, minor arterial streets every fourth block between, everything neatly at right angles matching the cardinal points of the compass, a far cry from Falconara with its scatterbox of houses jammed tightly together. So that children would not have to cross 87th Street with its heavy traffic, the School Board wisely decreed that all families living south of 87th would send their children to Burnside, those living north to Dixon. Alas, we were in the wrong school district.

     Chicago, of course, has always been known as a city of clout, where politics prevail, where what you get depends partly on who you are, but even more on who you know. Politically, Chicago was under control of the Irish. Ma and Pa, being Italian, had very little clout, would not even have recognized that word meant influence. However, we had as our physician a man who lived down the block. His name was Dr. Weimer, and he had offices in South Chicago, near the steel mills, and understood the needs and aspirations of the ethnic people he treated. Dr. Weimer also liked the three of us, who sometimes came to his house and sat on his lap. Ma and Pa may not have had clout, did not entirely understand the workings of the society in which they had been thrust, but they learned that with a letter from a physician they might be able to enter their children in a better school out of their district. Dr. Weiner wrote such a letter saying that the long walk to Burnside (it was one block further away than Dixon) would be detrimental to the health of Tony, and eventually Marion, Bea and me. So, one by one, we were enrolled at Dixon.

     Not entirely without a battle. Italy is largely a Roman Catholic country, influenced if not ruled by the papacy, its citizens at least tacitly Catholic. Although the seven families who settled Falconara in the fifteenth century had practiced the Greek Orthodox religion common in Albania at that time, the village of Falconara with its three churches was Roman Catholic. The Musacchios, of course, had lost their faith, soured by the antics of the philandering priests, the Lupis, their cousins. My mother had baptized Tony in Falconara, because not to have done so would have offended the custom, if not the religion, of that small village. But none of us three born in America had been baptized. Our family never attended mass at the nearest Catholic church, St. Joaquim's on 91st Street. So antagonistic was Uncle John to the Catholic church that, years later, he even would refuse to enter St. Joaquim's when Hal married one of his favorite nieces. He waited respectfully, but belligerently, outside during the ceremony while his brother walked down the aisle to give the bride away.

     One morning while Ma was hanging clothes in the back yard, me helping, a Catholic priest timorously appeared at the gate. He was young, somewhat pudgy, with a fair complexion and freckles. Dressed in a flowing black robe and white clerical collar, he removed his hat to reveal flaming red hair.  

    "Mrs. Musacchio?" he began. There was a certain Irish lilt to the way he said it.

     "Yes," Ledda answered.

     The priest accepted that response as an invitation to enter the back yard. He said, "You're Italian?" It was as much a statement as a question.

     "Yes."

     "Catholic?"

     "Yes."

     "I never see you in church, Mrs. Musacchio," stated the priest. "You don't come to church."

     Ledda, continuing to hang clothes, eyed the priest warily. "I don't go to church, because I don't believe in church," she told him.

     The priest, holding his hat with both hands before his stomach, moved closer and began a speech that, had he delivered it from the pulpit, might have been considered a sermon. He spoke of the need for all people to keep the faith, to attend mass each Sunday, and particularly the necessity--nodding toward me, who by this time was cowering behind my mother's skirts--to bring children up in the Holy Roman Catholic religion, particularly to have them attend a Catholic school.

     "They go to public school," snapped Ma peevishly.

     Recognizing my mother's rising anger, I fled to a hiding place beneath the back steps. This move took a certain amount of courage on my part, since there was nothing beneath the steps but dirt. It was a dank, dark place with cobwebs and spiders, and I never liked going under there because of the possibility of encountering bugs or mice or who knew what? But I was more afraid of the priest, who in sermonizing her mother had released the two-handed grip on his hat to gesticulate with the free hand. As his anger rose, he swayed back and forth, his black robes swishing and swirling. His red hair seemed on fire. The priest seemed to me some sort of apparition, something I might expect to encounter in a bad dream.

     "They go to public school?" raged the priest. "That's a heathen school, and they're not going to get a good education, and it's a mortal sin, and they're going to go to hell if they don't go to Catholic school and don't go to church, and you're going to hell too for sending them there!"

     "I'm not going to hell," argued Ma, her voice reaching a high pitch.

     "Yes, you are." The priest's face had turned bright red, redder than his hair, redder than the fires of hell with which he was threatening this obstinate Italian woman. "You're all going to hell!"

     "If I go to hell," countered Ma, "I'll meet you down there. You're going to hell too."

     "No, I'm not!"

     By that time, my mother had had enough of religion, particularly in its invasion of her back yard. "Get out!" she screamed. "Get off my property! Get out of my yard!" She reached for a clothing pole and began waving it menacingly at the priest, who finally began to retreat. On the sidewalk, he gave her one last withering glance, clamped his hat back on his head, made the sign of the cross, and stomped away, his black robes flowing behind him. "Don't you ever come back here again!" Ma shouted after the departing priest.

     Afterwards, although the red-haired priest never did come back, I would avoid contact with priests in the neighborhood, or particularly Catholic nuns, who in their black habits appeared even more fearsome, almost evil. As a young girl, two things would frighten me enough to cause me to cross the street: nuns and dogs.

     Dixon offered everything anyone might expect in an elementary school, and then some. Brand new, it had a library, a gymnasium, an auditorium with stage, even an audiovisual department that provided films on Friday afternoons. Also among the school activities was tap-dancing. For twenty-five cents, my sisters and I could obtain tap-dancing lessons after school, so even though that sum represented a major investment for Ma and Pa, nothing was too important when it came to the area of education. At appropriate times during our education, each of us was given a quarter to enroll in the tap-dancing class. Pa being a shoemaker, nailed taps to the toes and heels of our shoes. The class was held on the stage of the Dixon auditorium, the girls in a row, doing their steps: shuffle-shuffle-bow-change.

     Dixon also offered piano lessons, and I convinced my mother that my education would not be complete unless I learned to play the piano. Ma agreed, again providing the small financial payment, which nevertheless loomed large in the family budget. Once a week, I was given a lesson using the school piano. Unfortunately, I had no piano at home and could practice only on a cardboard keyboard provided by the piano teacher, a diminutive lady.

     All the others at Dixon taking piano lessons had pianos, and the teacher was concerned that I had none for practice. One day the piano teacher said to me, "I think I can get you a piano inexpensively."

     "I'll tell my parents," I said. But I was painfully aware of my family's limited finances, the fact that they would not be able to afford even an inexpensive, second-hand piano. I never thought of my family as poor, nor did Bea. "We weren't what you called poor," says Bea today, reflecting on the situation. "It was just that we didn't have any money." Our brother Tony felt the same way. "I never felt deprived," he says. "I'd get envious if some of the neighbor kids had something I didn't, but I never thought we were bad off."

     I knew that if I asked for a piano, my parents might feel obligated to provide one, and I did not want them spending any money. If they couldn't buy a piano, I didn't want them feeling bad about it, as though they couldn't provide their children with the same education provided by the wealthier parents of Chesterfield. I never did mention the piano and several days later told the teacher, "My parents decided against buying a piano." When my piano lessons ended, I did not sign up for any others.

     We had few clothes, mostly hand-me-downs. During the war, we collected clothing in our store donated by neighbors for war relief. Before sending it off, Ma would go through the clothing to find if there was anything her family could use. "This is too nice to send to relief," she would insist. "Family comes first," was her motto and she would save a piece of clothing for one of the girls. That is how Marion got her first bra. I was handed a coat from the bundle, but felt embarrassed wearing it in the neighborhood for fear that it would be spotted by the person who donated it.

     Communications between America and Italy were disrupted until the war ended; when the mails resumed, my mother again could send packages to her family overseas. She would place our used clothing in large boxes, which she would cover with burlap and sew closed, tying everything with heavy rope so it could survive the trip by boat. Years later, when we began traveling to Italy, one of the daughters of Michele Tocci, Delfina Ricucci, still remembered the packages. "You wore such pretty party dresses," Delfina told me. At the time, I didn't think they were that pretty.

     Ma would love retelling the story of a teacher who one day called Tony to the front of the room as an example to his classmates. "There's no excuse for coming to school looking bad, unwashed and in dirty clothes," lectured the teacher, who now pointed to Tony. Tony, shy, withdrawn, undoubtedly wished he could slide through a crack in the floor and vanish from sight.

     Except the teacher was about to pay him a compliment. "Look at Tony," she continued. "His family doesn't have a lot of money. His pants are old, but they're clean, and they've been patched nicely by someone who loves him. Even if you don't have money, you still can come to school looking neat and clean!" Tony walked much more straightly when he returned to his desk.

     My mother told the story of Tony's teacher so often that after I graduated from college and went to teach at Howland School, in the heart of the west side black ghetto, I would tell my class about my brother's raggedy clothes, again repeating the message that even if you don't have money, you still can be clean. Afterwards, one of the black mothers came to school and thanked me for saying that.

     Money was available for necessities, not for luxuries. Some time ago, Tony returned to Chicago for the forty-fifth reunion of his high school class. Also in town was Bea and her husband, Lou Fabbricatore, an executive with IBM in New York. Lou was leafing through Tony's yearbook when he realized that there was no individual photograph of his brother-in-law. Tony, now a successful tile contractor living in Arizona, chuckled, "Ma couldn't afford to pay for that picture."

     My older sister Marion loved candy, except the family had little money with which she could buy any. When Marion got a penny or a nickel, she would march immediately to Jacob's store in the middle of the next block on 88th street and invest her money in candy. Tony slept in the living room and hung his pants on one of the dining room chairs. When he was seventeen, he had a part-time job that earned him money. Often Marion would find change on the floor beneath his pants, sometimes (when she truly wanted some candy) in the pockets themselves.

     One morning Marion found a quarter belonging to Tony and ran quickly to Jacob's blowing the entire twenty-five cents on a bag of candy. A penny or nickel might not have been missed, but a quarter was a large sum of money. While Marion was enjoying the candy, she learned that our mother was angry, looking for her. Knowing the reason for her mother's anger, Marion hid the bag of candy in the “prairie,” the name Chicagoans used to refer to a vacant lot.

     Arriving home, Marion discovered her mother awaiting her with a switch in one hand. A chase commenced around the dining room table, Marion attempting the standard tactic employed by us of wearing our mother out. Eventually Ma prevailed and Marion received a beating. Tears in her eyes, still smarting from the beating, Marion eventually returned to the prairie and located her bag of candy--and ate its contents. "I had no shame," Marion would recall.

     I remember the time, during a visit to the dime store at 90th and Cottage Grove when I stole a balloon from the counter, the first and only time in my life I ever shoplifted. The balloon was red. I didn't give it back. Nobody ever found out.

     When Marion was in eighth grade, she learned that she would need a white blouse and pleated, navy blue skirt to participate in a chorus. She asked our mother for the skirt, but Ma said it was too much money. Soon after, the tonsils of one of my sisters became infected. Dr. Weimer determined that if the tonsils were to be removed from one, they might as well be removed from all three, a special, so to speak, on tonsillectomies. After the operations, the three of us dozed in the recovery room and Ma appeared to comfort us. As my mother wiped Marion's forehead with a cold cloth, Marion whispered. "Ma, can I have the navy blue skirt?" She got the skirt.

     During the summer the three of us would go to Tuley Park, which was near Burnside School. Our mother encouraged us to take craft and library classes at the park. Later, when I was in high school, I would go to square dances at Tuley Park. After I went to Burnside, I got to know a lot of the Burnside kids. They were tougher than my classmates from Dixon school, but not any worse. They didn't lead us astray.

     Tuley Park had a swimming pool. Two days a week the pool was open for girls, two days a week for boys, one day for cleaning. Evenings and weekends it was open for everybody--except blacks. One day a teenager from the black neighborhood near 95th Street appeared at the pool. He drowned, not because of his lack of swimming ability it was suspected.

     For a time Pa had operated a shoe repair shop, before being forced to close it during the depression and seek other employment. Toward the end of the thirties, he lost his job after the company he worked for learned he had diabetes. Pa still had the shoe repair equipment stored in his garage. When we had moved into the house on 87th, there had been nothing but dirt beneath. Now Pa raised the house on stilts, giving him room to construct a basement. Into the basement he moved the shoe repair equipment. He repaired shoes, blocked hats, and operated a steam press iron that was so hot that it left him gasping during warm summer days. He never enjoyed repairing shoes, as did his brother-in-law Angelo, but it was a way to make a living. Eventually, Pa would build a ground-level addition to the front of the house.

     The store dominated our lives. There was a buzzer on the door and, if we were eating and a customer arrived, someone would need to interrupt their dinner and go down and wait on that customer. To discipline us girls, Joe would sit at the table with a leather strap over his shoulder. It was long and narrow with one end sliced into strips like a cat o' nine tails, the implied threat being that if anyone acted up, the strap would be applied to a part of our anatomy. I never recall my father ever having used the strap, although once I made him so angry I had to hide in the closet to avoid his wrath.

     I had less success avoiding the wrath of my mother, whose favorite tactic in disciplining children was to pinch. I needed pinching more than my two sisters, because I was more the pest. Sunday mornings, our favorite activity was to read the paper in bed. We slept in the same room, and sooner or later I would grab the papers, punch someone, or do something to torment my sisters.

     On Saturdays, we cleaned the store. Marion cleaned the machines. My duties included the hat blocker and the sewing machine. Bea swept. I often dallied during my work. One day while I was supposed to be cleaning the dining room after having risen late, I talked back to my mother. Ma accepted no impertinence and came charging after me. After the obligatory several laps around the dining room table, Ma finally caught me. She was so furious, she couldn't stop hitting me. Thinking back, I don't blame her.

     My mother sometimes became angry when her girls laughed too much or got into typically feminine spells of uncontrollable giggling. My mother would say nobody should be that happy. "If you're going to laugh that much, you're going to cry that much," she claimed.

     A bath was a luxury. We had no hot water heater, so could obtain water for a hot bath only by heating it in a small, coal furnace. Bathing was for once a week, Saturday nights. Not that the three of us were dirty, since we washed ourselves regularly, but only once a week were we permitted to get into a tub. When Ma bathed us, she was all business, washing us one at a time. Pa was more lenient, permitting all three to climb into the tub together. He would wash us, then sit back and wait, allowing the tre vaiz to play, splash each other, and chatter among ourselves.

      Tre vaiz, that's what Marion, Bea and I were--although that was a phrase my husband Hal would not comprehend until years later when we went to Falconara to research this book. Hal and I would wander from home to home, talking to friends and relatives, people who remembered Pa and Ma, who knew of our family in America, who had seen photographs sent back to Italy. Most of the conversation in Arberesh between me and the villagers was incomprehensible to Hal, but every now and then that phrase, tre vaiz, would almost leap from the babble. Tre vaiz means "three girls." The villagers remembered that among my mother's family, in addition to the male son, were three girls.

     "Oo guh dee!" That was another Arberesh phrase Hal mastered during our numerous trips to Falconara. Oo guh dee, means, "I don't know." That’s a phonetic version of the phrase. I can’t recall ever having seen Arberesh written, except in some of the books of Papas Belluschi. When my parents communicated with relatives in the old country, they wrote in Italian, which they had learned in school. For them, Arberesh was entirely a spoken language.

     Marion still has on a dresser in her bedroom one almost classic

photograph, copies of which most certainly must have been sent back to

the old country. It shows Ma and Pa and the three of us. Tony is

in the photo too, just before he went into the service. There's also an

ancient, round-topped radio in the background, one that stood in our family's living room. It is a formal photograph, taken professionally, one that we might not ordinarily have been able to afford, except a photographer client of our store owed us money for his dry cleaning bill. Strapped for cash, the photographer could not pay. In lieu of payment, he offered us service, and so the family portrait was taken. As Falconarese, the Musacchios were used to trading goods and services.

     I felt more the pressure from having parents who were foreign, who had accents, who had had minimal education in the old country, who had taught themselves to read English, yet didn't do it very well. The three of us would bring letters home from school and have to translate them for our parents. Or our parents would go to the bank and return with forms that would need to be explained to them. So we were constantly translating for them, which put pressure on us. Anything from school that came home, we'd have to explain it to them before they'd sign it. We could easily have lied to them, but that wouldn't have entered our minds. Later, I would become a teacher and have in my classes black or Hispanic children, who would return with unsigned letters and forms. Other teachers in the school would become irritated with the children, and their parents. I never would. I remembered.

     Among exciting moments were trips to the Italian neighborhood on 12th Street, near downtown. The first time Ma visited the Italian neighborhood was soon after arriving in the United States. Unable to speak more than a few words of English, yet fiercely independent, my mother obtained directions and boarded the street car, west on 87th Street to Halsted, then transferring to another street car headed north to 12th Street, the heart of the west-side Italian settlement.

     Except Ma failed to get off at 12th Street. The street car continued several blocks further before my mother realized she had missed her stop. Ma pulled the overhead cord signaling the motorman to halt at the next intersection. That happened to be Madison Avenue, Chicago's skid row. The buildings were decayed, mostly taverns and flop houses for the derelicts who shuffled and staggered along the sidewalks, flasks of whiskey or bottles of wine stuffed in their pockets, eventually to collapse into doorways to sleep it off. The streets were covered with dirt, trash, broken glass. My mother must have wondered: is this the land of opportunity?

     Standing alone on the corner, she worried what to do next. Several of the derelicts eyed Ma strangely, and one began walking toward her.

     The derelict wore clothes both crumpled and dirty. He had several days growth of beard. His eyes were bloodshot. He spoke to her in English, so she couldn't understand what he was trying to say. Finally, Ma realized that the man, regardless of his appearance, had sensed her discomfort and had come to offer help to a fellow human being in need. Through a combination of sign language and a few English words that Ma understood, she learned that she had gotten off at the wrong stop and that the Italian shopping area she sought was several blocks further south. The man waited until the next street car arrived and saw that she was safely on it. As she headed back south, my mother turned and waved at the man, marveling that her new country could be both so rich and so poor.

     Visits to Taylor Street after that were much less anxious. Ma began to look forward to what became a monthly trip to the neighborhood that, with its sights, smells, and sounds, reminded her so much of home. As the three of us grew older, we would accompany Ma on her trips. One of the first stops would be at the Central National Bank, whose tellers spoke Italian and were adept at aiding their customers in sending money back to the old country. Another stop was Ferrara's Bakery with its cakes and canoles in the Italian style. Everybody in the bakery and the other nearby stores spoke Italian, a relief to my sisters and I because it made us think that maybe we weren't so different after all. This was what Italy must really be like, we thought. Ma had become acquainted with old Mrs. Ferrara, who sometimes would offer her a small glass of anisette.

     We would go into stores with cheeses and meats hanging from the walls. Mozzarella. Scamorze. Saporsatta. Prosciutto. Baccala. Tubs of live lumaci, snails, that made Marion wince. We would visit the Jewish merchants, who sold yard goods. Ma would buy cloth that, through her skills at sewing, could be converted into dresses for us. Shopping bags crammed with her purchases, Ma would usher everybody back onto the street car returning south along Halsted. The shopping bags reeked with smells from the foods unavailable in the Burnside neighborhood, so the closer they got to that neighborhood, the more the three of us would become uncomfortable at smells emanating from the bags at our feet and our mother's conversation with us in Albanian, so incomprehensible to others on the street car.

     We raised chickens in our back yard. Ma also purchased live chickens from a store near 90th and Cottage Grove that specialized in that fowl. She bought chickens live, because they were cheaper than chickens already slaughtered, dressed and separated neatly into breasts, legs, livers, and gizzards and wrapped in plastic as would be the norm decades later. But purchasing a live chicken meant you had to kill it, which my mother did, holding the squawking chicken by the neck over a wash basin in the basement, then severing head from body with a butcher's knife. I would sometimes watch, but not too often. My sisters and I became chicken-pluckers, since the chickens had to be plucked of their feathers and chopped into pieces before they could be eaten. Ma wasted little of the chicken; what was not fried was kept to be made into a succulent chicken broth.

     When we bought meat, it was not the expensive cuts, more often round steak or bologna. On the few occasions when we bought a steak, Ma would need to pound the steak with a wooden mallet to tenderize

     Much of what our family ate came from the garden behind the house and in the lot next door. We grew tomatoes, carrots, corn, beans, spinach, leaf lettuce. We had pumpkin plants, but never waited for the pumpkins to mature, preferring instead to pick the pumpkin flowers, a great delicacy when served breaded. Compared to his brother John, who raised his own seedlings in a hothouse, my father was not a good gardener, except for raising flowers. He did not have the patience or the interest for crops that you could eat. But Ma used the skills she learned in Falconara working on the farm to grow food for the family table. She employed the three of us to pluck offending weeds from the soil around their crops, or pick worms from the tomatoes, a task I detested.

     Bea remembers her mother cooking: "When we were really young, she did everything, made everything from scratch. She made her own noodles. I can remember coming home from school and finding a big piece of dough flattened, laid out on the bed. Ma put a clean sheet on the bed to make ravioli and noodles." The bed was chosen because it was a large, flat surface. My mother would have made dough and used a long, narrow rolling pin to flatten it on the kitchen table. Then she would fold the dough and carry it to the bed to dry while she used the kitchen table for other meal preparations. The sheet was only to protect the bed clothes. After the dough dried sufficiently, Ma would carry the dough back to the table and fold it into six-inch folds, placing the dough at the edge of the table. Then, making quick karate chops with a sharp kitchen knife--bang, bang, bang, bang--she would slice the dough into perfectly formed quarter-inch noodles.

     For ravioli, my mother would prepare the dough the same way, drying it on the bed before returning it to the table. In the meantime, she would

have made a filling out of spinach, bread crumbs, cheese, some sort of meat, or other delectables. We would then help her roll the filling into one-inch balls, which would be positioned every few inches on only half the laid out dough. Beaten egg whites would be brushed in square lines between the balls to form a sort of glue. Then the uncovered half would be folded over the meat-covered half and gently pressed down. "My job used to be cutting it," remembers Bea. This was done with a specially grooved cutter resulting in the serrated edges customary with ravioli.

     Particularly delicious was my mother's chicken broth, filled with papettas, miniature meat balls. As for bread, we never knew what store bread tasted like. Bea recalls: "We would come home, and the dough would be falling out of the pans." A Falconarese specialty that we all loved was coodatches. This was simply dough twisted into shape like large doughnuts, then fried in a pan with oil. Coodatches were particularly delicious when eaten hot. In later years others would cover coodatches with powdered sugar, but I liked them best plain. My father's favorite was when the coodatches were prepared with sardines inside. Before I was married to Hal, I traveled with several of my girl friends down to New Orleans for Mardi Gras, staying in the French Quarter. One of the things one did while attending Mardi Gras was to rise at 5:00 A.M. and go to the docks where one could purchase deliciously hot French pastry, called beignets. On my visit, I dutifully rose early and headed for the docks, but when I bit into the highly touted French pastry, I was disappointed. I told my friends: "This is nothing more than a coodatch!"

     If I today have one regret, it is that I never learned all of the culinary tricks that my mother had brought from Falconara. When I was in college, I sometimes would wander into the kitchen to look over my mother's shoulder as she prepared food. But my mother would chase me away: "Don't waste your time in the kitchen. Get back in the other room and do your studying!" This from a woman who had been privileged to attend school for only four months.

We were different, I realized while growing up. Because of the way my mother cooked, even our house smelled different from other houses in the neighborhood. I had a good friend in school whose name was Sue. Sue was blonde, blue-eyed, with hundreds of freckles. Her mother always was nice to me. They lived in an apartment building near Dixon, typical of the apartments built during the period between the two wars in the expanding Chicago neighborhoods: Three floors, U-shaped, a courtyard in the middle with bushes, grass, and flowers, four or five doorways leading to tiers of apartments, six to a tier. You entered a vestibule where there were brass mailboxes and a line of buttons with names of the people living in the apartments. You encountered a speaker into which you could talk, and people talked to you, and if they recognized your voice and name, they would sound a buzzer that permitted you to enter the next door and ascend the stairwell up to their apartment. I thought that that was the epitome of richness, living in an apartment where you had to buzz to open the door.

     While my two sisters and I were growing up, our mother insisted that when we went anywhere, the three of us always had to be at her side. We were not allowed to move without Ma saying so. As a result, we were shy, quiet. If we went to anybody's house, we only asked for something, or moved, after we received our mother's permission.

     On the street, away from home, we often were less inhibited. I often played with a classmate from Dixon named Norman Vinik, and the bane of our life was a red-haired boy across the street who attended the Catholic school at St. Cotilde's. He would torment us, which would force Norman and I to beat him up. One day when the Catholic children were off school because of a religious holiday, the redhead stood across the street chanting at Norman and I, "We don't have to go to school, because we're smarter than you."

     In neighborhoods where half the children went to the public school, half to the Catholic, that was equivalent to a declaration of war, assassinating the archduke, dropping the bombs at Pearl Harbor. Norman and I chased the redhead down the block and when we caught him, Norman shoved the redhead's face into a snowdrift until, coughing and choking, he screamed for mercy. I later was convinced that had I not pulled Norman away, he would have suffocated the redhead.

     I sometimes walked to school with Donald Morris, another Dixon classmate. Once in third grade, Donald and I were passing the swamp

east of St. Lawrence that within a decade would become a housing development complete with shopping center. Donald decided that it might be a useful idea to bring some tadpoles to class. Marion and Bea, walking ahead, continued toward school as Donald and I lingered, obtaining a glass jar and pushing a rudely constructed raft that was part of the neighborhood flotilla out into the shallow and muddy waters of the swamp.

     When we finally arrived at school at 10:00, jar of tadpoles in hand, the teacher marched Donald and I to the blackboard, where they stood for the rest of the day. Later when I was teaching school, I confessed to my students about this great transgression. "Ooo, Mrs. Higdon," my students said, widening their eyes, covering their mouths, snickering. "Did you really do that?"

    One afternoon when I was in fourth grade and Bea in third, we walked home with another girl. We came to the corner of 87th and St. Lawrence, where we had to wait for a westward-bound street car that had halted to discharge passengers. When the noisy street car continued, electric engine humming as it accelerated, steel wheels rattling against the tracks, bell clanging, we began to cross 87th behind it.

     Suddenly a car appeared coming from our right. Though there was a stop sign, the car had failed to stop. There was a thump, then a screech of rubber against concrete. Bea flew into the air. My friend and I screamed.

     Pa appeared in the doorway of his shoe repair store, still wearing his cobbler's uniform. He ran to Bea and cradled her in his arms. She was unconscious. "Somebody please get us to a hospital," pleaded JPa.

     The driver who had hit Bea had pulled to the side of the road. He was drunk, barely able to walk much less drive. Two men from another car also had stopped, and they said, "We'll take her." They headed for Burnside Hospital at 92nd Street and Cottage Grove Avenue, Pa saying to me as he climbed in the car: "You stay here in the store."

     I waited in the store until eventually my mother appeared with Zia Chiara. The two women were dressed in their best clothes. They wore hats, having returned from classes downtown where they were studying to become American citizens. Ma saw that I had been crying.

"What's wrong?" she asked. "Where's Giuseppe?"

     I told of the accident. Chiara became so disturbed that she began hitting her head against the wall. Ma said to her sister, "See, Chiara. We never should have left home to go to school. It wasn't right for us."

     Bea had a severely fractured skull. After the car flipped her in the air, she had struck her head on the pavement. For several nights Beatrice hovered on the brink of death. My mother, convinced that her daughter never would have been hit by the car if she had been home waiting for her, remained at the hospital seeking some signs of hope. Night came and Ma still sat in the chair beside her daughter's bed. The nurses told her, "You go home. Don't worry, we'll care for her."

     But Ma said, "You're not telling me to go home." She remained in the hospital room all night and the night after that, refusing to leave until she was certain her daughter would survive. Not that my mother did not respect the doctors, or the nurses, but she had the old country attitude of: you respect them, but you don't trust them.

     In a room nearby was another young girl in an oxygen tent. The girl apparently suffered from pneumonia. During the night, Ma noticed that because the girl had stirred in her sleep, a piece of tubing from the tent had become disconnected. My mother went to the nurse's station and said, "Something's wrong." The nurses came and fixed the tent. Later the girl died. Ma was convinced that if the girl's mother had stayed with her, this tragedy would not have happened.

     It was a terrible time for the family. The drunk driver had no insurance, and bills began to mount. But within a few days, Bea was out of danger. Because of the skull fracture, she had to lie in bed with her head immobile. She could not move it, particularly toward the fractured side. I never thought that my sister had been in any danger of dying. I was too jealous of her sudden rise in status. The nurses thought Bea was darling and brought her dolls and toys. There had been precious few toys of any sort for the three of us to play with at home, and I recall going to visit my sister, seeing all the toys, and thinking, "Holy cow. Is she lucky."

     Eventually Bea was released from the hospital and life was restored to normal in the Musacchio family. Normal for my father was working from eight in the morning to seven at night, repairing shoes, doing dry cleaning. They were open six days a week, from Monday through Saturday, but invariably some neighbor would come by on Sunday, knocking on the door, apologizing, but they needed some garment for that day. That was the trouble with living over the store.

     In the front window we had a sign that said "Chesterfield Shoe Repair." The sign was neon, red, and it fascinated me, because it sizzled. Pa was somewhat lackadaisical about his business. He hated to work in it. He didn't mind the shoe repairing as much as he did the dry cleaning. Most of the clothes they took in for cleaning were sent to a cleaning plant, but they came back unfinished. Pa did the pressing with a giant steam iron that hissed and blew clouds of steam into the air. Operating the iron was easy during winter, but it generated so much heat that summers were miserable. I remember seeing my father in the summer, working in his cotton undershirt, soaked with sweat, perspiration dripping from his chin. He hated it, and every chance he got, he'd get outside. The older he got, the more he would retreat to the back yard. He did his work, but he didn't enjoy it.

     My mother meanwhile constantly dreamed up new projects to improve our living facilities. "Take a wall out here, Joe." "The girls need this." "Why don't we put a door in here Joe?" "If we move this around, we can sneak a closet in here, Giuseppe." "Let's change the chairs and move them this way, Sep, and then we'll have a little more room, and I'll have a walk-in pantry." "We should do this, Joe. We should do that."

     Ma had so many projects to occupy Joe's spare time that he would become angry. He'd shout at her. Bea particularly would remember the battling between her parents. She would flee to her room to escape the noise. They'd argue. Ma would shout her pleas. Pa would rage over her request for him to increase his labors because of some foolish project she had dreamed up simply because she was a woman and had nothing better to do but cause trouble for him. "No, you can't do it!" he would state firmly. Then she'd get out her ruler, "Well, Giuseppe, two inches here." Sooner or later Ma would succeed in getting her husband to make the proposed remodeling. He always did it, but only after a battle. I thought my mother's ideas were good, one of them being to fix the door in the living room that led to the bedrooms. Ma had the door shifted to the dining room, which provided more privacy and made life more comfortable for everybody. Sometimes she'd yell and scream at him. Sometimes she'd talk to him real nice, and she'd measure everything out so all he had to do was cut something, but he ended up doing the work all the time.

     One afternoon in 1952, when I was attending Chicago Teacher's College, I returned home and found my mother in the store crying. The memory from years earlier of Bea flying through the air after being hit by the car flashed through my mind. "What's wrong, Ma?" I asked.

     "Ma mao dicke," she said. My mother's dead.

     Ma had just received a telegram from Marianna Molinaro in Rome. Several months earlier, Rosaria Tocci had brushed against the furnace while tending it and burned her leg. The wound failed to heal. The daughter of Chico's former mistress sent her daughter, Carolina, to stay with Rosaria and watch her. The leg developed gangrene, so Marianna brought her grandmother to Rome where her son-in-law, Alfredo Gaetano, who was a doctor, could supervise her care. But by then the gangrene had spread to Rosaria's thighs and into her intestine. Rosaria Tocci died May 22, 1952 at the age of eighty-six.

     Ma was crying, because she had left Falconara in 1927, a quarter century earlier, and it was the last time she had seen her mother. And I began crying too, because Rosaria had been the last of my four grandparents. And I never had gotten to see any one of them.

     Pa liked to drive. One of the luxuries he permitted himself was an automobile: a Plymouth in the late 1930s, a Buick in the 1940s. On Sundays, our family would get in the car and go somewhere, anywhere, often to Beverly Hills a neighborhood of luxurious houses several miles to the southwest. We would drive around Beverly Hills, looking at the homes of people who had more money than us, then drive home. We didn't envy those people, nor did we hope that some day we might be able to live in such a neighborhood. We were just curious to see how the other people lived.

     Eventually, as memories of the depression faded, as our fortunes began to turn upward, Ma and Pa acquired a lot in a southern suburb called Midlothian. There was nothing special about the lot. We never built on it, or apparently even planned to build on it, even though the lot remained in the family for half a century, my sister Marion continuing to pay property taxes on it. There were very few homes around the lot back then; it was merely a piece of property the simple Italian family had acquired, a symbol of prosperity obtained through frugality. And sometimes on Sundays, we would climb into our Plymouth, or Buick, and drive to Midlothian, look at the lot, then climb back in the car and return home. My sisters and I tolerated the trip, because on the way back home to Burnside, sometimes we would stop at an ice cream store on Western Avenue, where we bought rainbow cones, multi-colored, multi-flavored. That was a treat, something special, for a family with plain tastes.

     But sometimes we would be driving between lot and home and, looking out the window of the car, my mother would spot dandelions growing among the weeds and tall grass of the prairies we passed. It would happen in the spring, just before the dandelions flowered. "Sep, pull over," Ma would command. And to our embarrassment, Pa would park the car and our entire family would descend from it and move into the fields to pick dandelions, ingredients for the salads that came at the end of the meals of soups, pasta, and meat. It was something that, I suspected, the parents of my classmates never did! Even though I loved my mother and father, I never quite escaped the feeling of being different.

Chapter 15 >

Falconara: A Family Odyssey

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