Hugh Fox, Professor Emeritus, Michigan State University, was a founding member of the Pushcart Prize and was also on the founding board of COSMEP. In the 60s, 70s, and 80s, he edited the avant garde litmag Ghost Dance. He is one of the most widely published poets in America. Hugh was born in Chicago in 1932. He spent his childhood studying violin, piano, composition and opera with his Viennese teacher Zerlina Muhlman Metzger. He received a M.A. degree in English from Loyola University in Chicago and his Ph.D. in American Literature from the University of Illinois (Urbana-Champaign). He met his first wife, a Peruvian woman named Lucia Ungaro de Zevallos, while at Urbana-Campaign and was a Professor of American Literature from 1958-1968 at Loyola University in Los Angeles. He became a Professor in the Department of American Thought and Language at Michigan State University in 1968 and remained there until he retired in 1999. It was at MSU that he met his second wife Nona Grimes. They were married in 1970. He received Fulbright Professsorships at the University of Hermosillo in Mexico in 1961, the Instituto Pedagogico and Universidad Catlica in Caracas from 1964 to 1966, and at the University of Santa Catarina in Brazil from 1978-1980. He met his third wife Maria Bernadete Costa in Brazil in 1978. They've been married for 28 years. He studied Latin American literature at the University of Buenos Aires on and OAS grant and spent a year as an archaeologist in the Atacama Desert in Chile in 1986.

Jean Anne (July 20, 2010. Issue 19.)

Why, around the Fourth of July, did he start obsessing about her and her hair and slim long legs, 50 years since he'd seen her, started going into the closet and taking out old photo albums, his first marriage, second marriage, the funeral photos of wife number two, his years in Slovenia, Slovakia teaching English, part of the poet gangs in The Village in Manhattan, or out in San Francisco/Berkeley, photos of Carol BergŽ, Richard Morris, Curt Johnson, Harry Smith, Blythe Ayne....the old write-it-up days, starting to cry...calling his daughter, Alexandra, down in Columbus, Ohio with her husband's family? One, two...and surprisingly, she answered.

"So howya doin"? How come you went down to Sam's family's place and left me alone on the fourth...."

"That's true, most of your old pals are dead or moved, right? I'll come next week when we get back to Ann Arbor. A day and overnight....OK?"

"OK. Love ya..."

"Love you too...."

And then just him and the huge, empty house again. If he was twenty instead of eighty and it was Chicago or L.A. or Paris, instead of East Lansing, Michigan.

Back to the albums again, amazed at how much granddaughter Beatrice and he looked alike (when he was three like her), and how horrible his mother looked as she got older, turning from Vamp to Vampire in her final days at Mount San Francis Oldster Heaven in Paradise, California, those staring, killer eyes and the huge dark rimmed glasses that emphasized their killerness......

Almost time to eat. His usual almond-butter sandwich and guava juice filled with pulverized pineapple? Or should he just drive over to MacDonald's and buy a chicken-wrap, maybe see someone from the old days.....no...no one else around, his best pal Dick Thomas down in Santa Fe now, and all the others...Rest in Anxiety!

Then a sudden impulse, limped over to the phone next to the sofa and dialed 1-517-555-1212, the phone-info system that usually/always worked for him.

"What city?"

"Chicago. Chicago area. I want anyone with the name Kappell, that K-A-P-P-E-L-L...."

"I have two Kappells, Tom and Frank, here's the numbers...."

And he grabbed his sketch notebook on the table in front of the TV, a pen out of his shirt pocket and wrote down the numbers with feverish alacrity. Of course her daughters and she herself would have changed their names when they got married, but the sons.....

Tried Frank first. Last always first, Chinese luck-tricks.

A woman's voice on the other end. Fifty or twenty, he couldn't be sure.

"Hello....."

"Hi, this is Kevin Garrity, I'd like to talk to Frank Kappell...."

"What about?"

"I was an old friend of his mother's, back in the old days and I wanted to find out what's going on with her. I couldn't find her name in the phone Helper, so I thought...."

"KG...my mother-in-law, Jean Anne never called you Kevin Garrity, but always KG...sometimes she'd say it meant Knight of Garrulousness...."

"Knight of what?"

"Blathering...," a suspiciously long pause, then a solemn retort, "You seem so solemn...."

"Old age equals solemnity. Just look at the old faces, all they can think about is the next step and the next spoonful, the next temperature, blanket, toilet-time...."

"That's not what I see here in Chicago, the older you get the....I was going to say "crazier," but that's not it...the older you get the more social / society-hungry you get...that's what I see all the time at the Margot Bistro, Berghoff's, Charlie Trotter's, the Yummy Gourmet in Arlington Heights, all these rolling-in-gold retirees talkety, talkety, talkety, talkety....."

"Those names don't ring any bells for me...."

"You're like Julius Caesar going into downtown Rome..."

Laughing deliciously, at least she obviously felt it was delicious, but he didn't.

"So where's Jean Anne?"

"So where do you live?"

Getting suddenly Nazi-bayonet wild.

"I ASKED WHERE SHE IS!!!"

"WAS!"

And a sudden hang up.

Almost wanted to just let it go, wait until winter and drive up to the Upper Peninsula and go for a long, nowhere walk, out into the real forests. They were all over mid-Michigan too, but never that-that-that-that endless, you'd always end up next to some farmhouse or....

Phone ringing again. Almost didn't answer it, thinking about how painless fun it must be to do freezing to death, the best sleep he would ever have, no more Melatonin and Xanax or Passiflor, just dreamless, joint-painless, crotch-painless, anxietyless, boredomless zeroness, the best way to pass eternity, how did they ever-ever-ever believe in eternal heavenlyness,total, unadulterated JOY!?

"Hello...," as soft as a baby-cat meow. Frank?

And on the other end of the line total repentance.

"I'm sorry. We're both so tired of the U.S. backwarding it into zeroness....so where do you live?"

"Mid-Michigan. East Lansing."

"I've been there, when Illinois fought the Grecos..."

"Not Grecos, for god's sake, SPARTANS! The Spartans weren't Greeks, but enemies of the Greeks."

"So what do you do there?"

"Suffer. I taught art here for forty years, now I'm an atheistic widower turning the walls of my misery into Picassoish murals."

"I'd like to have you come up...I mean DOWN to Chicago, for a visit. Meet the family, a least some of us."

"When?"

"This weekend. A quick half hour flight."

"Twenty minutes...but I'd rather drive down, I love the drive along the lake in Indiana. Give me an address. Today's Wednesday, I could come down on Thursday afternoon..."

"OK. It's 444 Kingston Place in Chicago Heights. Easy to find.. You've got an E-map, right?"

"I'm Se–or High Tech, no problem. See you tomorrow. And a thousand...you know..."

"Likewise."

And that was it.

He couldn't get the names and relationships straight. Such a gang. Counted them. Out in the backyard of this gigantic old (1855?) house that had been all redone, fixed up, repainted, immense elms and the weeping willows he always loved, loved, loved....they were weeping, weren't they, and inside he was weeping too, realizing that this could have all been his family. Mr. Only Child, his tubal pregnancy mother who had her other tube severed after the one tube was gone, luckily her tubes working when he was en route into the real world in real time....

A magnifique barbecue, all the kids and wives and brothers and....

"There's one person missing," half-whispered Tom, Frank's brother, sitting down next to him after he had just finished a tummy-killer plate of barbecue and was munching on a gigantic slice of watermelon, the largest he'd ever seen, a huge, very fancy napkin hanging over his shirt front.

"Missing?"

"Jean Anne's oldest daughter, Raquel. She's thirty-nine, only she's not here because....," pausing, to tell or not to tell, that is the question, "I want to take you over there in a few minutes, we can just disappear, like we're going to the local drug store for more goodies or something...."

Putting down his watermelon. That was enough. All his piss-problems, he'd be up half the night as it was, with all the beer and everything else, like the old Chicago days when he was growing up and holidays were Romanesque, Irlandesque, fetes of the ancient Dionysian, Zeusian gods....

"Let's just go now...."

"OK."

Tom, the lawyer, he looked like a lawyer even without a fancy shirt-tie uniform on, something circumstantial, bibliographic about everything he did or said, or even the way he so carefully walked, as if the grass were filled with slipable-on ice.

"Where are you going Tom?"

His wife? It must have been his wife. Her name already erased. The best legs in town, the best super-made-up-eyes and obviously weekly-dyed hair.

"Need a few more...."

"I can come along, a little talk-time..."

"No, that's OK...just enjoy, enjoy, enjoy...."

A smile that yessed into totally joyfulness. Whatever Mr. Big Lawyer (on the edge of becoming a judge) said.

Out to his new Ford focus parked down the block a little. Air-conditioning on.

"She's not far away. I, I mean my wife and I, support her. All kinds of diagnoses, but....you'll see...."

Just a few blocks down, the trees already beginning, just beginning to change, turning the whole world her into a technicolor dream-nightmare, thinking before you know it it'll all be leafless branches and seven months of big freeze....moving out of mansion-world into middle middle-classness, then lower middle-classness, pulling into the driveway of this stone-house that almost looked barnish, all the windows boarded up....

"What's this? Deserted?"

"Nah, there's a couple of open windows in back, as long as the weather allows it, at night she's got some board-shutters that make it look deserted, so no one tries to...you know...."

Uncut grass,weeds all over the place,leaves from last fall....

Pulling into the driveway, getting out, going into his shirt pocket, pulling out a cell-phone, eins, zwei, drei....

"We're here."

The front door opens and out steps.....he can't believe it, Jean Anne reincarnated, the same long slippery frog legs and Hedy Lamarr eyes and hair. She steps down the leaf-strewn front steps and reaches out for him.

"Finally! I always heard so much about you....., come on in, I've got some green tea and guava cookies waiting for you."

"OK," Tom mini-smiling, obviously all kinds of plans coming to their fruition in his head, "I'll be back in...let's say half an hour," turning to her, "You call me if you want...you're Ms. Cell-Phone..."

"Ms. cyber-world," she smiles, Jean Anne's glorious smile reincarnated, and in they go....

He can't believe the inside, perfect wood floor and rich carpets, paintings all over the walls, much like his own, a huge TV in front of an equally huge plush sofa, nice and cool and fresh, obviously some nicely concealed heating-cooling system, down a perfect hall, past a perfect bathroom right out of 1902, perfect curtains on the perfect windows, the wood window cover-boards painted a dull beige so you hardly noticed them, lights on everywhere, a kitchen with all the latest-latest stoves and microwaves and hand-carved wood chairs and table.

He picked one chair with a nice maple-leaf painted plush seat-cover on it, sat down, stretched back, the table already full of full tea cups and cookies.

"You can stay overnight if you want....move in....."

Starting to get up, time to leave, what was the word, when you molest kiddies...pedophiles...she wasn't quite a ped, but there was something sacred about Jean Anne's memory, Saint Jean, Bless me, Saint Jean for I have....why did he ever follow this line into hallucinatory madness? Edge of senile decadence....

"You leave and you die!" she suddenly jaguars at him, standing up and moving over behind him, her hands around his neck.

He pulls away...violently...runs to the door.

"So you're a paranoid schizophrenic! Now I get it. Full of smouldering ruins...."

"Talk about smouldering ruins!," she smiles, suddenly turning back into a water lily, sitting back down, waving him delicately to sit back down too, a little touch of Debussyian ballet.

"L'apres-midi d'un faune..." and he sits down, she comes back and sits opposite him, starts delicately sucking on her tea, "I should explain to you that I underwent an orchiectomy five years ago....prostate cancer....I'm as neuter as a cattail...ooops....no, that's not the right image...as neuter as a water lily...."

"I love water lilies, rivers, here, out in the hinterlands, in Scotland, Ireland, northern France...I want to go back to origins. I know you have lots of retirement money, and my mother used to talk about you full-time, 'He's so educated, soaked in music, opera, ballet, languages, literature, painting...he sees everything in multi-dimensional dimensions....I don't know why he ever left town, went to Madrid and Paris to study art, lost contact with me. I guess I was pretty much a hick-split compared to the dolly-wollys he met abroad...broads abroad rather than local Chicago yokels....he was so "European," and I was so middle-nothing....I've spent my whole life yearning-burning for him. If we'd gotten married I would have ended up a violinist instead of a guitarist, a ballet dancer instead of dog-walk-around-the-blocker....I hope some day you get a chance to meet him and....'"

"And what?"

"I don't need sex, youth, boredom, I need....."

Up again, her arms around his neck, afraid she would strangle him, a diabolique inside her just waiting to be (possessed) activated, but she stayed soft, went over to her huge sofa and stretched out and it was the first time he felt sexually activated for years, at least in his brain, nothing moving down past his neck. What would be the sin-crime to marry her.....?

"I'll give it to you straight," purring now, undercurrents of pet me, pet me, pet me, he'd always hated (was allergic to) cats, but...,"straight....I'm not Jean Anne's progeny, I'm her REINCARNATED, and not just carnis-flesh but soul-spirit-mind-feelings....you believe in reincarnation, don't you?"

Feeling he ought to just leave, what was Tom's phone-number, soul-number....was it all some sort of conspiracy to get rid of her, get rid of supporting her, some kind of madwoman whore-splice, escape....?
He could just hitch a ride, find a bus, do some walking, call a taxi, find a drugstore and work from there, getting up, not getting up, getting back down, leaving and staying....maybe mental disease was something else that they (sexless, fleshless but not obsessionless) shared.