Who, Me?

by Who, Me- A Memoir (retail) (epub)

  I was at home at last, on the horse that was made for me, in the perfect saddle, on the perfect (Anglian) hills on the finest day of the windblown year; almost Oxonian, Harvardian—at last ME.

  The whole time I was growing up my mother had gone to this women’s club at Hamilton Park, the Hamilton Park Women’s Club. Met all kinds of nice women, listened to all sorts of lectures on art, culture, mental and physical health. But it wasn’t really “fancy” enough.

  When I went into pre-med though, and she found out that there was a Stritch Medical School Women’s Auxiliary, she joined immediately. Immediately.

  And loved it. She could wear all of her fancy hats and suits and shoes and drip herself diamonds and rubies and be quite “normal.”

  And who should she meet at her first meeting of the auxiliary but Marcella Volini, the wife of Dr. Italo Volini who had been dean of the Stritch School of Medicine when my father had been a student there.

  Some twenty years earlier, my G.P. father had wanted to specialize in obstetrics he’d taken and passed all the necessary tests (he’d been delivering babies as a General Practitioner for decades), and all he needed was a letter of recommendation from his former dean, Dr. Volini. So he’d written to Volini and Volini had (quite reasonably) written back, “I haven’t seen you for years, Fox, why don’t you come down to my office at 1611 N. Dearborn Parkway and we can visit for a while, let me get some idea of what you’ve been doing in the last few years, put some ‘life’ and ‘reality’ into my recommendation.” Only my father refused to go and see Volini. “He has his nerve. I was fourth in my graduating class, I passed all the tests for specialization, I’ve been delivering babies for years, the babies of my babies, for God’s sake . . . I’m not going to kiss his near north side ass!”

  So he never went to see Volini, never specialized. Pride? Stupidity? An inferiority complex? All three?

  Now my mother meets Mrs. Volini and although when she met her I was in pre-med, somehow Mrs. Volini misunderstood my mother and got the idea I was in medical school, and she had six daughters to help find husbands for. So I got invited down to the Volini home (where Dr. Volini also had his office) on 1511 N. Dearborn Parkway to this Christmas party . . .

  The house was a true mansion.

  All massive brownstone. You walked inside and all outside noise instantly vanished. All the walls covered with wood, all kinds of cornices and things, big chandeliers.

  Mrs. Volini, met me at the door, all beautiful and refined, not glitzsy like my mother, but underplayed elegance.

  “I’ve heard so much about you from your mother, all your artistic background, now being replaced by medicine. Or maybe I shouldn’t say ‘replaced.’ You never replace the artistic . . . shall we say ‘added on’ to the artistic. What a wonderful combination, n’est pas?”

  “Le verite! The truth!” I concurred with her as we walked up this huge marble stairway up to the fourth floor, where the party was being held. An actual ballroom. A huge ballroom. Everyone dressed to their ultimates: formal dresses, some tuxes, picking up some Italian, German, French. Someone on a piano, a beautifully hand-carved piano, over in the corner, Debussy’s Pour le Piano.

  “This is Hugh Fox,” presenting me to this beautiful blonde in a mustard-colored velour formal, all this fountain of hair, magnifique, “Hugh, this is my daughter, Virginia—Ginny—”

  “My pleasure.”

  Giving me a little hug. Subtle opiumish perfume.

  “Mine.”

  “I’ll take care of him, mother, and I wish you wouldn’t keep going up and down those stairs, you’ll wear yourself out. We do have servants, n’est pas.

  “I need the exercise!” smiled Mrs. Volini, waving me a little goodbye, Virginia taking me around and introducing me to everyone, pleased when I could speak a little Italian to the Italians, a little German to the Germans, a little French to the French, me feeling it was more like some sort of ball out of Jane Austen than anything to do with hog-butcher of the world Chicago.

  “So what year are you in medical school?”

  “Well, I’m actually still in pre-med.”

  “Pre—? I thought you were in medical school. You look . . .”

  How did I look in my rustic brown Harris tweeds with my brown wool tie and roughish looking brown shoes?

  “Out of place?”

  “Well, not really out of place, but a little ‘shaggy,’ like you were hunting grouse somewhere in Sussex or something,” she couldn’t help but laugh, a light, crystalline laugh, making me feel I wasn’t in the real world at all but in some sort of high society film, very Irene Dunne-ish, “and very young. Let me take you downstairs to my sisters, Yolanda and Dolores, you’d be perfect for them . . .”

  And she took me by the arm, past the piano I couldn’t help but comment on, “What a beautiful piano, it looks hand-carved,” “It’s French,” down an iron-balustrade staircase into a big family room on the third floor, the door closed, another piano, one Volini playing piano, another listening, something very Bach-ish.

  The piano player stopped.

  “This is Dolores,” the piano player, “and this is Yolanda,” the listener, explaining to them, “This is Hugh Fox, he kind of got into the wrong party, maybe you could—”

  “Take care of him?” Yolanda laughed, coming over to me and giving me the once over, “He looks like he can take care of himself . . .”

  “And then some,” joined in Dolores.

  “OK,” Ginny out the door, blowing us all a kiss, “a bientot.”

  I sat down.

  “Keep playing.”

  “OK.”

  Yolanda closed the door, explaining, “So we don’t disturb their royal highnesses upstairs . . .”

  Dolores was good. Excellent.

  And when she was finished and we went downstairs to the kitchen and had some (decaf) coffee, she explained that she was going to be a concert pianist eventually, go to the Chicago Conservatory after she finished high school, “or maybe to Julliard . . .”

  It was Yolanda though, who finally escorted me to the door and told me “Call me sometime, maybe we could go out or something . . .”

  So I did. Took Yolanda out a few times. Later on she told me that all I ever did when I took her out was to talk, talk, talk, “It was like going to a lecture—series of lectures—I learned more about Church history than, well, it was like getting a Ph.D. in the lives of the saints, the history of Christianity. Before I met you what did I know about Luther and simony and nailing up his protests on the church door at Augsburg in 1517 . . .”

  I guess I was really a stiff.

  But somehow Yolanda transferred me to Dolores somewhere along the line, and Dolores and I hit it off splendidly, hit every concert, every opera in town, would go out afterwards and go on and on about quality, performance, all the nuances.

  She really knew her stuff.

  And, so, I guess, did I.

  Then I’d met Mary Joan and fallen head over heels for her, and had gotten “sexual,” something that Dolores would never have gone for. Although she looked sexy when we’d go out, in her black high-heeled pumps and black stockings (which I suggested). Only we never descended into the flesh, no incarnations for us, just mind, mind, mind.

  Now, after I’d broken up with Mary Joan, I called up Dolores again, and we started going out again, just as I was starting my M.A. in English. I even asked her to marry me. The poet and the pianist, the perfect match.

  “Let me think about it,” she’d said. “You know I care for you, deeply, it’s just that we’re so—both of us—young and . . .”

  And . . . dot . . . dot . . . dot . . .

  And what?

  Our next date she came up with the answer.

  “No, I can’t marry you now. Perhaps never.”

  “But we have so much in common.”

  “That’s not the point.”

  “What is the point?”

  “I’d prefer not to talk about it any further. Maybe we should
just part . . . amicably . . .”

  Which we did. And it wasn’t until I’d gotten my M.A. and gone down to the University of Illinois in Urbana-Champaign until I found someone else I really wanted to marry.

  But I never really got over Dolores.

  Mary Joan was sensuality, sexuality, eternal eroticism, the promise of life as an endless series of orgasms, but Dolores was brownstone mansions and hand-carved French pianos, summer homes out on lakes in the country, wood-paneled walls and huge staircases, children who would become doctors and lawyers and CEO’s or CFO’s, everything inside the structure of Dominis Vobiscum (The Lord be With You), Et Cum Spiritu (And with Your Spirit), the Holy, Roman Catholic Church.

  You could talk about anything with her. I’d be reading Huxley’s Point Counter Point and she’d start reading it, I’d fall in love with Howard Hanson’s Romantic Symphony and she’d borrow it from me, listen to it, and be all ready to talk about it on our next date. I almost wrote “at our next encounter,” because that’s what they were, not just “dates,” but “encounters,” spiritual meldings, nothing sensual (although she was always beautiful in her own Mona Lisa-ish subtle way) but spiritually/intellectually expansive, sharing . . .

  We weren’t one in flesh (yet) I used to feel when I went out with her, but we certainly were one in spirit, soul.

  But her NO was pretty definitive.

  Medical school flunkout/dropout; it didn’t make any difference when I explained that I’d flunked out on purpose because I wanted to be finished with the whole medical business once and for all . . . she never said it, once a flunkout, forever a flunkout, but I could read her mind; she saw me forever as flunkout, dropout, forever incapable of sustaining her style, her way of life.

  The irony was that years later, one time at a literary conference in Chicago, I called her and she came to lunch with me and my writer pals (at the member’s lounge at the Art Institute, where I was a lifetime member) and I found her utterly stuffy and flat. She’d dropped out of music altogether, had gone into law, gotten a job in a Chicago law firm, married the head of the firm, now she was a childless widow. Childless? Ten children in her family. A nice round ten; and I’d expected at least that many from her. But none? And a widow at fifty? The chispa (spark) gone, rather tedious, pedestrian, stuffy.

  And Mary Joan?

  Well, Helen told me all about her recently.

  Seventy. Osteoporosis. Those beautiful legs with osteoporosis?!?! Walking around with a cane, no less. A widow. Seven children. Living in a luxurious apartment on the lake. I wrote to her. No answer. I thought maybe we could become “friends,” at least that. But no answer.

  The irony was that Mary Joan was the Soul of Honesty, confessional, truth-telling. And when I went down to the University of Illinois and found a wife, I found someone who was the Soul of Deception, the essence of double-talk, concealment, trickery. What if I’d just told Mary Joan, “OK, so you had a little sexual slip, no big deal. Let’s just start everything fresh, OK? Say an Act of Contrition and go in peace. Or don’t go, stay and we can have our peace together . . .”

  But, oh no, I had to be Mr. Righteousness, didn’t I? And when you come right down to it, it wasn’t very “Catholic,” was it? I was supposed to be this Super-Catholic, but what I really was was Señor Judgemental, very low on forgiveness and understanding.

  But I paid, didn’t I, when I met and married this cute little charming Peruvian with all the winning ways; she certainly won me, didn’t she?

  Of course the first thing I did at the University of Illinois was to get involved with the Church. Saint John’s Catholic Chapel.

  Joined the St. Vincent de Paul Society.

  Daily Mass and Communion.

  A little (sexual) slip now and then, but I kept reading St. Augustine’s Confessions. If he could control himself sexually, I could, too. Period.

  Got a job at the cafeteria at the student union where I worked the dinner hours, got to eat as much as I wanted one meal a day, got a job as “proctor” in a boarding house where I was kind of in charge of keeping order in the house in exchange for a free room, my parents helped out with the tuition, and eventually I even got a job teaching freshman comp. And then one night there was this dance over at St. John’s, I went and . . .

  She was SO cuteish, petite, blackest of hair, blackest of eyes, light-skinned, these gazelle-thin ankles.

  “How about a dance?”

  “I don’t know, thees American musica. No hablo muy bien el Inglés” (I don’t speak English well).

  “Hablo el Español como nativo" (I speak Spanish like a native),” I answered.

  After all I’d had Professor Paul, an ex-FBI agent, for Spanish professor at Leo High School in Chicago, and my father’s sister, my Aunt Elsie, was a professor of Spanish at Bowen High School . . . although, rather oddly, I’d thought over the years, as she had her M.A. from the University of Chicago in French, not Spanish.

  “Fabuloso, al final encuentro alguin con quien puedo hablar. Soy de Lima, Perú y . . .”

  I got the first part. Kind of. Fabulous, I’ve finally met someone with whom I can talk. I’m from Lima, Peru and . . . but then she sped up, up and over the hills . . . the Andes. Took off like a condor and soared and the best I could do was to understand a word here and there . . .

  “I’m afraid you’re going to have to suffer in English,” I finally said after she’d finished her soaring.

  “How much did you understand?”

  “Well, I’m a language genius and all that, 99% on my Graduate Record Exam in linguistic ability, 24% in scientific ability, and, of course, I first went into medical school—”

  “So you’re a doctor?”

  “No. The point is that I switched careers, from medicine to English.”

  “But why not Spanish?”

  “Well, you never know . . .”

  The music suddenly getting very hoochy-koochyish, samba, bamba, conga, whatever-a, and she grabbed me and pulled me out on to the dance floor.

  “Vamos a bailer, tienen muy poco musica con sabor latina” (Let’s dance, they have very little music with a Latin flavor).

  And dance I did. Faked it.

  All that ballet I’d been watching over the years, I could fake anything.

  Brother, could she dance. Pure fluidity. She wasn’t people any more but coconuts banging away in the middle of a hurricane, dolphins leaping, chimps going crazy in the zoo at feeding time.

  This was what I was looking for, a little touch of exotica, beauty with a foreign flair, Le Natural, atomic power on the dance floor.

  After the Latin music was over and they returned to gringo stuff, she begged out, “Ya basta (That’s enough). Let’s go for some coffee.”

  “OK.”

  Going over and getting our coats. Late September, southern Illinois, just a touch of what was to come in the air, the whole campus ablaze with color, all the buildings great imitation of Oxford-Cambridge, pure Gothicism, Gothicism surrounded by flaming trees.

  We found a little coffee place downtown, had some muffins and coffee, and exchanged histories.

  She was originally from Lima, her father a mining engineer, one brother an M.D. (in Trujillo in northern Peru), another a lawyer in Lima. She had an M.A. from Washington University in Saint Louis, was getting her Ph.D. here, teaching in the Spanish department.

  Her English may have been terrible, but everything else about her was pure charm, charm, charm . . .

  Even her name: Mimi Espinosa.

  “My father (faaa-t-er), he love La Boheme, name me after Mimi there . . .”

  “But she died of tuberculosis.”

  “Don’t worry, I am super-tip-toppy shapey.”

  And she coughed a deep, deep cough just to prove it.

  To make a long story short, within a month we were engaged, already talking about a June marriage. “Why to wait? You crossing the river, why wait for the crocodiles to get you? Move, move, move . . .”

  I got a cheapy littl
e amethyst engagement ring, the best I could do.

  Invited my parents down to meet her.

  Lunch at the student union, this Gothicish building at the near-end of the Quad (Quadrangle); you know, the classic university campus structure, always a quad at the center, a kind of giant park flanked by important buildings.

  Very fancy, the student union dining room.

  Very expensive.

  Mimi and I were footing the bill.

  We were both teaching, what the hell, slowly moving from desperate to almost comfortable.

  My mother was all dressed in her mink stole and mink hat, all brownish with brown highest-heeled shoes and lots of leg showing, ankle-straps of course, thin little straps around her thin little ankles. Perfect makeup. My father 100% Mr. Doctor, double-breasted blue suit and grey Homburg, severely starched white shirt and low-key dark-red tie, a cigarette in his mouth full-time—or not in his mouth but in his hand—then a few puffs, carry it for another couple minutes, another few puffs . . .

  “So this is her!” he said as we met each other on the steps of the Union.

  “This is me!” smiled Mimi with her most gorgeous, captivating smile.

  I’d bought her a new suit for the occasion. Grey. Skirt conservatively below the knees, low-heeled shoes, her hair all carefully tamed and curled—by me. It was the most important moment in my life, I had to make The Perfect Impression on The Grumps.

  “Very nice English!!” my father lauded her.

  “Thanks to Hugo!” smiled Mimi.

  “Hugh, please, his father is Hugh; if he ever has a son perhaps we can carry the tradition on. Like the French kings Louis the Fourteenth, Louis the Fifteenth—”

  “Careful now,” I laughed, “you’re moving into the French Revolution”