THE AMAZING STORY OF THE TONELLI FAMILY IN AMERICA : On The Road in Search of the Italian-American Experience, in Which One Man Discovers Identity, Ethnicity, Kinship and All That

Once upon a time, I had the luck to open a piece of junk mail that changed the world.

Not your world, maybe, but mine, though even I didn’t know it at the time. At the time, all I knew was that I was about to become a $27.95 sucker, thanks to an irredeemably cheesy appeal that began:

Dear Friend,

As you may already know, we have been doing some work relating to people who have the same last name as you do. Finally, after months of work, my new book, “The Amazing Story of the Tonellis in America,” is ready for printing, and you are in it!

We have spent a great deal of effort and thousands of dollars . . . and have located almost every Tonelli family in the United States. My new book features this valuable and extensive directory of Tonellis living in America. . . .

Due to the uniqueness of the Tonelli name and the small Tonelli population in the U.S., it is economically impossible to produce extra copies after our scheduled publishing date. This is the first edition of the book, and it is certain to be quite a rare and valuable acquisition.

I believe this is the only book of its kind in the entire world, and you will want to have your own copy. . . .

Would you fall for that? Look, I knew I was making an idiotic mail-order acquisition --it was practically a Thighmaster. And when the burgundy leatherette-bound, gold-embossed volume arrived, it was bad, but no worse than I expected--with a spurious Tonelli coat of arms (crossed goats over a bed of linguini), some very generic advice on how to hang yourself from your family tree and, the only part I cared about, the complete directory of Tonellis in America.

Amazing. A Tonelli in Texas! A Tonelli named Abner! And, to my chagrin, only two Dr. Tonellis in the whole frigging country. It went on and on that way, page after page--roughly 350 Tonelli households in 22 states, a thousand or so individuals, .002% of the American population, give or take. The book listed only names and addresses, but for some reason I was spellbound; reading it had the same effect as staring at a map: uncompromisingly quotidian at first but capable of sucking you into a dream state.

And, in fact, for months after, the giddy-dread sensation of reading the junk-mail book lurked in my thoughts, undigested, unabsorbed, floating to the fore at odd times. Once, while riding through New England, I flashed on the memory that a great many Tonellis were listed in Massachusetts. There in the front seat, intoxicated by velocity, a vagrant urge seized me: Wouldn’t it be something to get a car and, using the junk-mail book as my guide, drive around the country to shake the hand of every Tonelli in America? I saw myself steering confidently up to the grassy borders of countless anonymous suburban tracts, leaving the engine on, hopping out, ringing the bell and extending a paw of kinship past the half-opened storm door to the astonished resident. (“ You’re who? Wait--let me get the camcorder !” ) Then I’d race back to my wheels and peel out to my next visitation. Crazy! The obvious impediments to such a spree---I hated driving, plus the trip would require a luxurious amount of time and money--didn’t occur to me because I knew I’d never actually do it.

Until, of course, I did it.

“C’mon, I have to hug you if you’re a Tonelli,” says Denise, wife of Rick Tonelli, who’s not home from his auto-repair shop yet. I have just made my way down a country lane near Lithonia, Ga., and turned in at a rustic-looking mailbox bearing my last name. Funny to see it way out here, within sight of Stone Mountain.

Denise is effusive and bubbly, just the opposite of Rick, who comes home and tells me, once we’re settled in the living room, “See, I’m just the opposite of you. I’ve never been interested in my family history.”

“And I don’t understand that,” Denise says. “I’m a Heinz 57--Jewish-German is my strongest suit--but if I was Italian, I would want to know so much . Like his mother’s father; he came over here and moved to Mississippi . To be a farmer ! Trying to speak English with an Italian-Southern accent . I mean !”

Rick Tonelli’s a friendly but taciturn guy, born in Connecticut. His father died at 46, when Rick was 16, which had been the last time Rick saw either Connecticut or any of his extended family there. But a few years ago, Rick was approaching 46 as his son, Craig, was about to turn 16. And Rick started to feel the similarities. So. . . .

“So we went on a trip to Connecticut to see my father’s brother, my uncle,” Rick says. “We call him Lolly, but his name’s Alexander. Usually, we’d go to the beach for our vacation. But I really wanted to see my uncle. And it was our best vacation ever.”

“We were worried that Craig might rather have gone to the beach,” Denise says. “These were people Craig and I had never met. But I knew how much it meant to Rick, and I would have crawled on broken glass to make that trip.”

“It seemed so funny,” Rick says, “Because we had never been around any Tonellis, and we pull up to my uncle’s house, and there are the cars, with plates that say ‘TONEL-1’ and ‘TONEL-2.’ ”

“You have to understand,” Denise says, “on that trip we heard all these things that Rick never knew, and he sat there for two days and listened to his Uncle Lolly tell stories about the old days, and Rick laughed and cried at the same time.”

Rick squirms at the mention of crying.

“Yeah,” he says offhandedly. “It was a good trip.”

“And we were in stitches for two days,” Denise says. “And I cried and Rick cried--”

“Yeah,” he says, heading her off at the pass, “this uncle of mine is so cool. Anyway, we drove to their town up there, got a motel room, and then we called my uncle and said we were coming by. And when he heard about the motel, he went crazy. ‘Whaddya mean, you’re in a motel, we have all this room.’ Now I hardly knew these people. But the second night, we stayed with them. We even slept in their room.”

“Oh, God, remember?” says Denise. “The rosaries?”

“Yeah, I have a great family.”

“You’re lucky,” Denise says.

“Yeah, I can’t complain. And our son also loved it.”

“Well,” Denise says, “he’s very proud.”

Rick shrugs. “He’s more interested in family and that stuff than I am.”

“He’s proud,” Denise says.

“Well,” Rick allows, “I am too.”

Craig comes in from his job at a convenience store. He’s a gregarious kid of the New South, baseball cap on backward, about to join the Air Force.

I ask, “Do you come across many Italian kids at school or anywhere?”

He shakes his head.

“How about Brent?” Denise says.

“Yeah,” says Craig, “ He is. He’s my real good friend, too. But I just don’t think of him as being Italian .” Then he grins and turns his cap around, and on the front it says “Italy.”

I get to the parking lot (Chip and Dale section, row 9) early and ride the monorail to the Magic Kingdom’s gate, where Ed Tonelli, a Disney World janitor, and I have agreed to meet. But where is he? Wait a second. There’s a three-foot-tall employee in a jumpsuit walking my way. Please, let this be Ed. Imagine, a midget Tonelli. Nope, there he goes.

I’ve never been to Disney World. When I called from New York to ask Ed if he’d show me around, he agreed in a second but had a request: “Bring me some provolone,” he said. “I buy it down here, and it tastes like plastic.”

So I’m feeling like a latter-day immigrant, standing outside the gates to the Magic Kingdom with a chunk of stinking cheese in my bag. An hour later, I’m still hanging, so I call Ed’s apartment from a pay phone, and he answers. Could I really have failed to spot the only man in Disney World in a green “M*A*S*H” T-shirt and shades? OK, so he’s on his way back, but I’m pissed, until I see this jolly little guy in oversized, impenetrable black goggles striding toward me. Gotta be Ed. I’m happier already.

“My mother brought me down here to visit for the first time about nine years ago,” he tells me. We’re in a theme restaurant just inside the gate, having a big breakfast: “Daisy Duck’s eggs.” “We got hold of one of those cheap package deals. And when I got here, the magic hit me. I got impregnated by that pixie dust. I came back to visit every year after that. Well, some years I missed, but then other years I came twice. I always knew this was my place down here.”

Finally, at 37, Ed made the big leap: He applied for a job at Disney World and got one. Back home in Connecticut, he’d roamed from security-guard job to dishwasher job to janitor job. “I took sick days all the time. I had the worst attendance record ever. And here, as of now, I’ve got 19 months of perfect attendance. I’ll never go back to Bridgeport again, not for a funeral or a wedding, not even my own. It’s part of my past.”

Now breakfast’s out of the way, and he’s ready to begin the grand tour. We head first to Splash Mountain, which is dear to Ed’s heart since part of his duties involve scrubbing the big plastic logs that carry customers down the mountain. (He also cleans one men’s bathroom, which he includes on my tour, and a ladies’ bathroom and a baby-changing room, which he does not.)

We wait in line, then climb side by side into our bobbing log; in the darkness of the mountain’s innards, I hear Ed laughing at every one of the robot animals’ jokes, even though he’s heard them a thousand times by now. Slowly, we’re rising to the peak of the ride’s big dramatic drop, but instead of gripping the rail with all his might--like me --Ed throws his arms up in the air and braves the final, splashy 50-foot plunge no-hands.

We travel through some kind of pirate thing, then zoom over to Epcot, and all I remember there is a ride through the history of the world as narrated by Walter Cronkite and a walk through a series of pavilions devoted to foreign countries. “Here, let’s go this way,” Ed says, stepping from Norway into Mexico. “I want to take you through Italy.”

In a Georgian-looking building, something called “The American Adventure” is about to begin. A crew of collegiate weenies dressed in colonial and antebellum costumes starts to croon: “This is my country, land of my birth. . . .”

“Hey, Ed,” I suggest after about 12 seconds, “why don’t we skip this and go somewhere we can talk?”

“No, we have to stay for this,” he says urgently. “This is really beneficial. I know you think it’s a drag. But since we’re cutting it short”--I’d already told him, three hours tops for the whole tour--”I don’t want you to miss the best parts.”

The show isn’t as bad as I expected. It’s a lot worse. It’s hard to understand the point of making robot actors so lifelike that they’re almost human when it’s so cheap and easy to use humans in the first place. I’m squirming through a half-hour of the Ben Franklin robot and the Mark Twain robot tossing prefab homespun one-liners back and forth; if I hear the words “freedom” and “liberty” once more I might strangle poor Ed, I think. In the darkness, as the final crescendo of platitude-swapping cranks to life, I scribble in my notebook, “ This is f - - - ing inane! “

I’m carving in the exclamation point when Ed turns to me and says, “Doesn’t that make you proud to be an American?” I’m so torn--between thinking that Ed’s gone a little goofy on Disney World and thinking that his quest to find a hometown he can love makes him the wisest man I know--that all I can do is nod.

Before I went on the road, I sent a four-page questionnaire to every Tonelli household in the mail-order book and then some, 450 in all. “As you’ll see,” I wrote in the cover letter, “I’m asking the questions you’d expect--about how you live, your jobs, your eating and social habits, and how much (if at all) you feel your Italian background in your daily life.”

I got back more than 200 questionnaires, hired professionals to crunch the numbers, and here are some highlights:

Only a little more than half (53.3%) of the Tonelli Nation is of full Italian ancestry. As it turns out, I could use lots of my interviews as research for a book about German Americans. Of respondents under 30 years of age, almost three-quarters have only one Italian parent.

Most responding Tonellis (52.3%) are the grandchildren of immigrants. And most Tonelli ancestors came from north-central Italy, above Rome.

Most (57.4%) did not marry someone of Italian ancestry. Of course, since many of them are not of full Italian ancestry themselves, their choice of mate doesn’t even represent intermarriage. Sociologists say that endogamy--marriage to someone of your own group--is the most important indicator of strong ethnic identity.

Forty percent of Tonellis speak a few words of Italian, 24.1% speak none at all and 16.6% speak it fluently.

Most (72.9%) thought “The Godfather” was the best of the Godfather movies; 8.5% voted for “II” and only 2.5% went for “III.” (Scary to note that 2.5% of Tonellis are insane.)

When Tonellis serve tomato sauce, 67.3% make it themselves, 27.6% open a jar, and 4.5% do both. About 80% of Northeasterners make it themselves, compared with 42.1% of Westerners. And 75.5% of Tonellis of Italian-only ancestry go homemade, compared with 58.1% of those of mixed ancestry.

Because I don’t really trust myself around numbers, I commissioned Dr. Richard D. Alba, a professor of sociology at the State University of New York, Albany, and a respected authority on ethnicity, to analyze the Tonelli Nation census. In the “near future,” he wrote, the fourth generation will begin to define the majority of Tonellis in America, “an important transition, because the fourth generation has little or no contact with the immigrants and thus is missing a set of experiences that can help to sustain a strong ethnic identity.”

Even now, according to Dr. Alba, “the ethnic dynamics visible in the demographic data for the Tonellis lend themselves to a ‘soft’ form of ethnicity. . . . Signs of ethnicity tend to be muted and to be kinds that, like food, can be appreciated by, or at least do not give offense to, those who do not share one’s background.”

In other words, we Tonellis have never been less Italian than we are right now, and we’ll never be even this Italian ever again. The “us” and “them” mentality goes, but with it goes the idea that anything more meaningful than macaroni holds us together. And that’s true not just for Tonellis but for all Italian Americans, and I’m sure for every other kind of hyphenated American, too. You’re going to miss us Tonellis when we’re gone. You’re going to wish you had been nicer to us when you had the chance.

I’m in a living room in Escondido, just outside San Diego, listening to a burly, thick-fingered exterminator play a delicate, lyrical, sentimental melody on his piano. He composed it, and his wife and I applaud when he finishes. Then Beatrice and Mike Tonelli and I sit at the kitchen table.

BEATRICE: I came out here from the Bronx on vacation when I was 18, with my mom. We took the train from New York, came to San Diego and stayed at Mike’s parents’ house--my aunt and uncle’s. And Mike and I met and fell in love, and I went back home and told my father I was moving to California, and we got married. Married for 18 years.

ME: Was anybody upset about it?

BEATRICE: Oh, we had a lot of . . . your parents more than mine.

MIKE: My dad, he was all against it. My parents didn’t want us in their house at all .

ME: How exactly did it happen?

MIKE: When they came out to visit, my dad told me to show my cousin around town. So I did. And we fell in love.

ME: But didn’t it occur to you that there would be trouble?

MIKE: Sure it did.

BEATRICE: Yeah, it did, but it didn’t stop us.

ME: How did your father find out?

MIKE: He caught me writing her a letter. He grabbed it and read it, and, oh boy, was he mad. Sheee. Plus, she started crying at the train when they left, so my dad and mother and her mother kinda went, “Well, what’s goin’ on here ?” My dad told me, “You can’t marry your sister .” I said, “She’s not my sister,” but he said, “She might as well be, she’s my brother’s daughter.” Then my dad said, “Oh, she’s not gonna come back and marry you anyway. You have nothing to offer.” And I was so tired of hearing that from him--”She’s got a good education and good job out there, she’s not coming”--so I said, “What do you mean, Dad? What about this? (Re-enacting the nonverbal part of their exchange, Mike looks down at his lap, so I do, too, and then we’re both staring at his crotch, which is pumping up and down on the chair.) Oooh, he almost sent me flying. “ You talkin’ about my brother’s daughter ?!” I said, “Yeah, I got plenty to offer, Dad.” He was really pissed.

ME: How did you break the news?

BEATRICE: On the train home, I told my mother that we had fallen in love and I wanted to come back to California.

ME: Was she mad?

BEATRICE: I’ll tell you, my mom was upset when I was going out with this Puerto Rican guy. She grabbed a kitchen knife and told him, “Your name is on this. If I see you with my daughter again, this is going right through you.” So she wasn’t that radical about Mike.

MIKE: She said she wouldn’t have married me if the priest back there hadn’t OK’d it.

BEATRICE: Well, I had to be married in church.

MIKE: But I didn’t think the priest would OK it.

BEATRICE: Fooled you, ha-ha.

MIKE: And a year later, my father said it was the best thing that ever happened to me. And at the time they had told me they’d rather see me marry a black person.

Mike and Bea saw a geneticist before they married, and he gave them the OK to have kids. They have two daughters, Ginette, who’s 16, and Sabrina, 12.

As I’m packing to go, Mike says, “Yeah, Italian is the only nationality there is. And if there were more of us, this would be a better country. I only wish I was pure Italian. My mother’s German. I don’t even tell people I’m half German.”

Then, as I’m walking out the door, Beatrice says, “Oh wait--did I tell you both my dad’s parents were Tonellis?”

“Mine too!” says Mike.

The woman at the Frontier Airlines office in Fairbanks, Alaska, suggests I get to the airport an hour early, even though the departure area is an office the size of a restroom and the plane is parked right outside the door. They just want you to get in a full hour of dread before you take off. A minute before we board, a Pizza Hut guy rushes into the office. “Hey, you barely made it,” says a man who takes delivery of one large pizza. I assume he’s going to eat it on the flight, but instead he belts it into the seat next to his. I knew Allakaket was out there , but until I witnessed how you get a pizza delivered, I had no idea.

I hate these little airplanes. I hate any plane where you can sit in the tail and still read the dials on the dashboard. As soon as we’re high, I open my eyes and see black land, white snow, frozen lakes and rivers, and miles of jagged mountaintops--no roads, no buildings, nothing human. After 15 minutes, we run out of land, too, and the rest of the hour it’s solid white outside. We start our descent, and I can’t see anything down there. We hit the ground, and I still can’t see anything. Wait--there’s a barn. A few log cabins almost totally buried in snow. Some people on snowmobiles.

“Who are you waiting for?” an Indian woman asks me.

“Stanford Tonelli,” I say.

“Stan’s out running his dogs. I’m Annie. Come with me.” At this point I would normally think to ask, “ Annie who ?” but instead I grab my bags, climb behind her on the snowmobile saddle, and off we zoom over a path of solid, bumpy snow that winds past the scattering of log cabins that makes up the village of Allakaket, population about 200 Athabascan Indians. I’d have a million impressions to report now were it not that all my concentration is in my knees and ankles, which are squeezing dents into the snowmobile, trying to keep me from bouncing off into the void.

A few months back, Stan had been the first Tonelli to call in response to the questionnaire. He had some weird news to report: “I’m not really a Tonelli. I don’t know if my father was Mexican or Italian or whatever, but he fought in the South Pacific during World War II and got malaria. Now, this is more or less how I understand the story from my second cousin. Anyway, he almost died from the malaria, except an Italian corpsman named Tonelli saved his life. And my father was so grateful he changed his name to Tonelli. I don’t know if it’s true, but that’s what they tell me.”

Stanford said he was born in Northern California in 1957, and his dad took off when Stan was small, leaving Stan’s mother to raise their three sons alone. I asked how he ended up in Alaska, and he said, “I had trouble dealing with people. No. I didn’t have trouble. I just don’t like people. I like peace and quiet.”

Despite the shadowy circumstances by which he acquired the Tonelli name, he welcomes my visit.

My corner of Stan and Annie’s one-room cabin is homey and A-OK, near the wood stove, with a curtain around the bed, a reading lamp and several small toys (the bed belongs to 8-year-old Justin). The whole cabin is maybe 20 by 20 and also holds Stan and Annie’s big bed, a sofa, a kitchen table, some chairs, cabinets, the stove, two TVs, a Nintendo and VCR, and a deep freeze.

Once I’m settled in, Annie and I go outside to wait for Stan. On their little piece of Alaska, there’s an outhouse, a shed and an oil drum, around which, half buried by snow, I can make out a few disconnected animal heads, forelegs and tails, and some scraps of gray fur--spare parts. Improbably, there’s also a street light.

Suddenly the profound Alaska silence is broken by weird noises, something between barking and screaming bloody murder. I look down the path, away from the village, and see these dogs, smaller and scrappier than I pictured, dragging a sleigh through the snow, and standing heroically at the helm is Stanford: Tonelli of the North.

Stan and I say our hellos and how-was-the-trips and all that. He’s a lean, quiet, good-looking guy, mid-30s. He asks if I saw any caribou herds as I flew in, and I say no, but the truth is that it never occurred to me to look.

After Justin comes home and we polish off a meatloaf, Stan’s friend and neighbor Philip drops by, and we men crack a half-gallon of Canadian Mist. The whole idea of my being here amuses Philip, I can tell. When the subject turns to New York, he asks, “Hey, Bill, tell me--did you ever sit in on a Mafia meeting?”

Justin wants to go to the high school basketball game tonight, so the three of us pile on Stan’s snowmobile and we’re off. Stan deposits us at the gym, and Justin immediately disappears with his school buddies, leaving me alone on the bleachers, the object, I suddenly realize, of sizable curiosity. One little kid, maybe 4 years old, stops dead in her tracks, astonished, when she sees me, then she cracks up laughing. Another one races by, touches my hand and keeps running. It’s like I’m suddenly on the wrong end of a National Geographic TV special.

The basketball game ends, and Justin and I go outside to wait for Stan. The darkness deepens; my thoughts, naturally, run to calamity: What if Stan forgot us? In my mind, it’s “McCabe and Mrs. Miller” time; one false step, and you’re permafrost. So I pull Justin out of his group of buddies and tell him we’re going to a house maybe 50 yards away to call Stanford at home. Like any kid, he’s willing to go along obediently with whatever foolishness an adult suggests. We walk maybe 20 steps into the night when I look down at him, and it hits me like an electric shock: I grabbed the wrong kid.

Well, look, I’ve known him for all of three hours at this point. Plus he’s bundled up in a hat that covers half his face. Plus, to my eyes these Athabascans look more alike that not. I see it all in a flash: Millions of miles from home and reliable legal counsel, in the middle of the most alien environment I’ve ever known, I have just kidnaped a small boy.

OK, as it turns out I did not grab the wrong kid. We make it to a telephone, call Stan, and he comes to fetch us straightaway. As we pull up to the cabin, I notice that the street lamp is broken.

“Hey, Stan,” I say, “your light’s out.”

“I know,” he says nonchalantly as he dismounts. “I shot it.”

What next? When I settle down to sleep, from outside the curtain around my bed Stan says, “Uh, Bill, if you hear any noise during the night and it’s a bear, the gun’s over here.” Got it, Stan. If I hear a bear, I’ll shoot myself.

The next day, Stan remembers he has something he wanted to show me. His mother recently sent him photocopies of long, handwritten letters from a woman in San Diego, the histories of three Mexican-American sisters born between 1878 and 1900. One of them, Adelaide Rodriguez, took as her third husband a man named Arthur R. Ybarra. Their son Jerome was Stan’s father. In the course of the letters, without explanation, Jerome’s last name changes from Ybarra to Tonelli. It’s a weird document, but it’s all Stan has to explain who his mysterious father was, who Stan himself might be. I think that the main reason Stan invited me up here was that he thought I might have some clues to share. But I don’t, except for a few pages I tore out of the San Diego phone book, the pages that list column after column of Ybarras. So I hand them over.

A little later, we decide to ride up to Graveyard Lake, to see about getting some ducks or maybe a moose. As we walk past his dogs, Stan points to one and says, “I’m gonna have to kill him.”

“Gee, how come?” I ask.

“He isn’t working hard enough pulling the sled. He isn’t giving 100%. He’s not worth the food I’m feeding him.”

“Why doesn’t he work harder?” I ask.

“I don’t know,” Stan replies. “Bloodlines.”

On the corridor wall of my cheap Des Moines motel there’s a faded “Lounge” sign pointing down a shadowy flight of stairs. At the bottom of the steps, I find a door, and behind it there’s a room with a jukebox and two pool tables; it’s like somebody turned his grandparents’ basement into a cocktail lounge. There’s a gorgeous, sassy Ethiopian bartender, obviously on very familiar terms with her cast of regulars: Gary, the 50-ish wise guy; Chester, the mild and laconic, prematurely bald guy; Donna, the spry, silver-haired grandmother in peppy sportswear.

I’m the silent, unknown presence at the end of the bar until two more women come in, and one of them, feeling frisky, puts some Patsy Cline on the box and asks me to dance. “Sure,” I say, and before long somebody asks why I’m in town, and I tell the truth. It strikes everybody funny for about a minute. Then a noisy group enters, including a woman named Janet whom everyone seems to know.

Chester leans over from the next stool and tells me, “That’s Janet Tonelli.”

My dance partner extends an invitation to see Mt. Rushmore.

“You should go,” Chester says. “You can see George Tonelli.”

Now somebody is at the jukebox, and “All Shook Up” comes on.

“ Elvis Tonelli ,” Chester announces.

It’s still dark when I leave Des Moines for Anamosa, Iowa, where Bob Tonelli pays the price for his crime. I have already met Bob’s half-sister Carmella, in a federal prison camp in Texas (cocaine); his cousin Mike, who also did time at Anamosa (armed robbery), and another cousin, Albert, Mike’s brother, who went to prison for willful injury. When I introduced myself to Bob’s elderly father, Charlie, I told him I was going to see his son in prison. “Yeah, get him out of there,” the old man told me. “He’s a good boy.”

To get to the narrow, airless conference room where Bob will tell his tale, I pass through two grim sets of barred thresholds. “As I remember it, it happened at approximately 11:15, 11:30 at night,” Bob begins. “I laid him down on the floor to change his diaper, and I went into the other room to get the diaper and baby wipes.

“When I came back, he had pooped on the floor, so I cleaned him up and cleaned the poop. Then I tossed him onto the--the papers say I hurled him, that was his mother’s mother’s word. I wouldn’t so much say that I hurled him, but I tossed him on the couch. By no means did I mean for this to happen. I can’t really tell you how much force was involved, but he hit an ashtray. He hit his head on an ashtray. Then he got up, and he walked around the room once, and then he fell down and went into convulsions.

“And I called 911. Then I called his mother, who was my girlfriend at the time. And I tried to get him to breathe. He was breathing, but he was breathing hard, and he, uh. . . . I was trying to give him CPR. His mother got there, and she called the ambulance. She had to look up the number in the phone book.

“And then, the ambulance got there and took him to the hospital. She called me from the hospital and said, ‘Did he hit his head?’ And I said, ‘Yeah.’ Then she said, ‘Well, he’s in a coma.’ He went on for a day and half. She called and said, ‘He moves, he opens his eyes when I call his name.’

“But then the day after that, the sheriff showed up at my house, and he said the baby had just died.

“If I could change things, I’d rather I was dead than that little child. I wake up at night . . . sweating. . . . I guess you’d have to go through it yourself. But it’s bad thoughts, bad dreams. Bad dreams. Oh . . . I don’t know. . . .”

Silence.

Since I first learned of Bob, I’d been looking forward, in a blackish way, to meeting the most notorious Tonelli in the world. Now here I am, having just encouraged a soft-voiced, visibly shaken 22-year-old to describe the bleakest moment any living being can imagine. I feel sick, and we still have a few minutes left.

I ask, “What would you be doing if none of this had happened?”

“I’d probably be in my own apartment,” he says, “close enough to my dad’s house so I could go over there to visit him.”

Heading east from Anamosa, only one thing occurs to me: Tough times make tight families.

Do I or do I not pay a visit to Alexander Tonelli in Connecticut? On the one hand, by now I’ve had enough Tonellis. I want it to be over. On the other hand, Alexander is the uncle to whom Rick Tonelli of Lithonia, Ga., paid that emotionally charged visit a few years back.

I pull off the highway and call, and he’s home and sounding hesitant. But if I hurry. . . . I zoom over and into the driveway, which is just as Rick described it, two cars sticking out of the garage, “TONEL-1” and “TONEL-2.”

“Yeah, Rick called me on the phone and said they were going to take a trip, and I said, ‘Well, come on up,’ ” Alexander, Uncle Lolly, says. He’s 78, a retired gun-stock maker, sitting in his dining room. “And he was tickled pink when he got here. I hadn’t talked to him or seen him for 30 years, since his father died. In fact, he had to say his name twice on the phone; it caught me off-balance. I wasn’t expecting him. And then he came over, and we reminisced, and he met all my kids and their families--I’ve got seven grandchildren--and he met so many people in such a little bit of time. We took him to see the house where he used to live. He was only about 6 years old when they moved. His father, my brother, moved away right after our mother died. He said, ‘Well, I don’t have anybody here. . . .’ ”

I ask him, “What do you think the trip meant to Rick?”

“That’s a good question. But there really isn’t much I can tell you,” he says with a shrug. “It was a pretty short stay.”

Anyway, that’s how it went for two solid months on the road with the Tonelli Nation.

I know it was just a trip in a car, meeting ordinary people, but it feels like a miracle happened to me. I met more Tonellis than I ever thought I’d meet, in more places than I ever thought I’d see. To be honest, all that traveling unhinged me, like an out-of-body experience, but I learned a lot, too.

OK, let’s get it over with. Here’s what I learned:

*

There really are Tonellis all over America.

Which, granted, I already had cause to believe, but now I know.

*

They really were happy to see me.

I know, partly because it’s flattering to be the object of someone’s curiosity for any reason. But my visits touched something genuine in these people, I could tell, some desire to connect with history or blood or experience. Their imaginations, like mine, were stirred by the vast mystery that there could be so many of us, in so many different forms.

*

But they really don’t think much about their ancestry.

The tie has been severed; no aspect of their lives speaks to their sense of themselves as creatures of history. They (or somebody before them) made a crucial transfer. They stepped out of the story of their blood and into that of their country. They’re Americans , and that’s why their ancestors came here in the first place, I guess. Those brave old greaseballs in the great beyond should be happy; they wouldn’t be able to recognize or even speak to their own flesh and blood.

The thought that comes to mind is that histories end in America--that for America to succeed, ethnic identity has to go out the window. This country isn’t dedicated to blood or even to shared memories, it’s dedicated to a proposition. The bonds of family and kinship, which have proved their savage power since before history started , have to be dissolved for this country to succeed.

So, do you see how America happened? It’s like algebra:

Ethnicity equals history

History equals memory.

America equals amnesia.

And that’s what’s amazing about the story of the Tonelli family in America: For the good of mankind, we had to try to obliterate centuries’ worth of memory in just two or three generations. And we did it. We forgot so well, we don’t even remember forgetting. Now we’re fit to live nowhere but here.

That’s probably what’s amazing about your family, too. (Go ahead, say it-- Ich bin ein Tonelli !)

So, that’s all of it, my only true story. I drove 12,000 miles in two months without killing anybody! As I met Tonellis, I felt as though I could claim them, and as I claimed Tonellis, I claimed America, too. Everything finally all came together. It really was a hell of a trip.