Vine: An Urban Legend

by Michael Williams

  51 Episode: Shock Brings Progress

  On the ninth day after Vinnie’s translation, Stephen met with survivors at his apartment. A shaken Aron, accompanied by his mother. George Castille, who cautioned him against haste: I know the show must go on, dear, but let’s wait until the body count is reckoned, shall we? Maia De Chevre was understandably absent, adrift in the wreckage of her family, so to George’s dismay, Stephen was replacing her as well.

  Stephen felt forced to decisions. His augury was Chên, the sign of shock and thunder and arousing:

  Shock brings progress

  Shock comes in laughter

  It terrifies for a hundred miles

  The sacrificial vessel is not lost

  All of this good, the consolation over losses. But the lines were moving like faults in earthquake country. Six in the second place again cautioned loss of all treasures, climbing the nine hills. But he would recover those losses, it told him, in seven days.

  This was heartening, he supposed. And yet the dropped lines continued to complicate readings, the possibilities bifurcating again. An unstable line in the fifth place predicted the shock spreading. He thought of the ’08 earthquake, his apartment jostled until the books dropped from the cinderblock shelves. Again he was told no harm, no foul.

  The sixth place was the most complicated. Shock brings ruin, it told him,

  and breathless dismay

  If it has first reached your neighbors

  there is no blame

  Dolores suggested that Maia be given time. That after all…

  Stephen bristled at her look, reminded her that tragedy or no, the dress rehearsal was only two weeks away, the opening night a week after. Too many people had staked their dreams and even their livelihoods.

  This was Pentheus, George advised him. A major role, perhaps the major role. As many lines as the god. How, in the short space of a fortnight, could he expect teenaged memory to take them in, much less turn water into Dionysian wine?

  It was a sticking point. Lacking passable young actors, Stephen had played out a tricky system of backup and understudy. Now the part of Agave was frankly up for grabs: Maia’s understudy was a high-school girl who could not shake a nasal, South End accent. The other options were little better: in the event of Aron’s illness or absence, Jack Rausch was to assume the role. Would that Aron were the one missing, Stephen thought before catching himself with a shudder. It was a horrible thought, and furthermore, Apache Downs was his backup Pentheus, and the thought of such change in the starring roles was karma enough for ill thinking.

  For a moment he almost gave in to George and Dolores. After all, there were other years. Defeated by the chaos, he had fallen back already on The Music Man for next year’s performance. Its cheer and full-volume American innocence what the crowd really wanted and what he needed by now, swept in the growing awareness that Euripides was too much for him, all that apocalypse and omophagy that could slip through his hands. He could replace the violent god with trombones and patriotic parades, and nobody would know the difference.

  So he almost gave in, so close to spilling the sacrificial vessel.

  Then Dolores—almost reluctantly, or so it seemed—offered herself for the part of Agave.

  He should have seen it coming. From her high school teaching to marshalling her son’s scattered talents all the way to taking in Jack Rausch, she had grown, since he first knew her, into the role of rescuer. And now she was playing a sacrificial vessel, he saw, giving up that dream of ingénue roles, of romantic leads, to play the mother she was. Never mind she had just defended Maia De Chevre to upstage her only minutes later: Dolores was a professional, a professional was always on call, and he was forced to buy into this performance.

  So he praised her at once, and was gratified when George, richly attuned to all kinds of theatrical ego, pointed out the nuance and depth that Dolores could bring to the role that Maia, despite some talent, was too inexperienced to gather.

  One problem dodged, then. But Apache Downs, all sulk and blemishes, was a Pentheus that made Stephen shudder, that he had never considered possible because Vincent was so reliable and apparently healthy. There was something he was hoping, something that had danced at the edge of saying when he and George originally discussed the cast. Now, their prospects narrowed to three weeks time and several perilous options, he hoped Aron would do the right thing.

  But to Stephen’s great relief, it was Dolores, in her newfound role as rescuer, who suggested the shift. She pointed out that Aron, who had stood the stage in reading and rehearsal with Vinnie De Chevre and learned the part of the prince with that of the god, could step into the other principal role. Jack Rausch had been present and prepared at every practice, his talent shown to be workmanlike at Antioch. He could do a passable god at once and might, with some coaching (which she would provide) rise to a strong performance.

  And just think, she offered. In Aron’s debut in the principal tragic role, the principal actor in the play, mother and son would be actual mother and son. It had a note of the inevitable about it, she assured Aron Starr, whose eyes slowly widened with rage and betrayal.

  52 Episode: Muriel’s Dream

  She was on about The Glass Menagerie when he picked up the phone again.

  Stephen had left his mother preaching the virtues of The Cherry Orchard. Over the last few days, in a number of phone calls, Muriel Thorne had second-guessed his choice of The Bacchae, running through Uncle Vanya and Hedda Gabler, reprising her own list of credits as though, at eighty-seven, she was being considered for the role. At one time, he hung up on her when she had opened the conversation with how they could compromise:

  You can do your Euripides, as long as it’s Medea.

  He had never considered Caller ID, thinking there was something furtive and cowardly about screening calls. But this time the calls were different. Muriel and Stephen were meeting on a ground they held in common, and she saw it as power struggle. When he called her on despotism, she shrank back, became the long-suffering mother, sweet, elderly, and oh so fragile, whose son had cast her onto the altar of his ego.

  Frustrated at every turn, he went to advisors. Certain that George Castille, about five years his elder, must have undergone the same torment with the formidable Amanda, he asked his old friend how he had endured the trial.

  Oh, honey, you outlive her, George replied, his eyes rolling back with the memory. You just wait until she dies.

  Nor did the next advisor console, I Ching presenting smugly the hexagram of the Marrying Maiden, which boded of undertakings bringing misfortune and nothing that would further. Whether these doomed endeavors were hers or his, the yarrow sticks did not say, but honed instinct and maternal history told him not to take it up, not to meet her on stage.

  He smiled when he spoke into the phone again. Knew she could hear it, that it would disarm her. She was in mid-speculation as to whether he could have a worse choice of play. Had decided he could, but found herself hard-pressed to name it.

  The Libation Bearers, Stephen offered. To her questioning pause, he added that it was the one where Orestes came back for vengeance on his mother.

  A still longer pause forewarned him, so he absorbed rather calmly her claim that indeed she knew The Libation Bearers and was just waiting to see if he could have meant it so cruelly.

  So my bastard grandson is still playing Bacchus? Muriel asked slyly, and again Stephen felt compelled to correct her, to assure that Aron was no blood of hers, that there was no reason to doubt that Robert Starr was the father. Was told he should have married that poor girl, made her honest and given that son a name and better genes. Told again how wrong he had done her, and he expected that, in this, his mother had a point he was not about to concede to her.

  So he pointed out Dolores’s track record: himself and Starr and, from what he had heard, several in between, including the Reverend Peter Koenig, a name he conjured because Muriel loathed the man.

  Like many actresses, he p
ointed out, Dolores Webb had trouble keeping a man.

  You should never have kidnapped that boy, Stephen. Koenig is a vengeful soul and you are no match for his power, Muriel warned her son. But I did not call to lecture.

  I wanted to tell you about the dream I had.

  As usual, he could not tell whether her accounts of dreams were genuine or whether she invented them as she went along. It almost always seemed that her dreams taught her son a lesson, that the vast network of the subconscious conspired with Muriel Thorne against him. So when her dream involved a visit to the Park Theatre on a brilliant summer night, Stephen suspected that it would conclude with Hedda Gabler’s walk out on stage, beckoning for Muriel to emerge from the wings, and exchanging clothes with her while her son exchanged scripts with Ibsen, doing what was right in the final hours before dress rehearsals.

  But instead, Muriel walked through the backstage silence. Brushed a gloved hand against scenery flats and examined the red, powdery crust against her fingertips. And there was a stairway here, she claimed, leading down below the stage, and following it, her hands spread before her in the dark, she heard the soft crackle of cobwebs breaking and felt the pull of vine and root against her arms and ankles. The air as she descended became warmer, stank of shallow river and the harsh, metallic smell of fluvial life.

  And she heard the rustle of moist leaves, the slog of something stirring in mud, and from some indefinite source—moon or lamp or candle—a faint light spilled and glistened over slowly undulant scales, over something coiled at the foot of the stairs.

  It was a warning, she told him. Her dream foretold danger.

  He assured her, thereby assuring himself, that the theatre had no cellar, that it sat on solid earth and that its roots drove deep into old and stable soil. But as he told her good night, as he invited her to attend the dress rehearsals he hoped she would pass up, he caught himself looking out the apartment window across the court and into the deep, foreboding enticement of the trees.

  53 Episode: Again Maia, Again No

  The time raced toward the dress rehearsals. Swamped by duties, by the handling of the cast, Stephen relied more and more on coffee to raise him in the morning, vodka to lull him at night. A half-hearted attempt to lure Maia De Chevre back to the production failed miserably: she refused to see him, and her family backed her fiercely. The hunt continued for Vinnie De Chevre, but it had been two weeks since he vanished, and everyone knew that a window of time had opened and closed.

  T. Tommy and the Brischords returned to their haunts in the park, having ducked the LMPD and persuaded the detectives that their only guilt was being the last to see Vinnie De Chevre. As vagrants in good standing, they knew someone who knew someone related to someone, and by that chain of knowledge and their known intake of alcohol and God knows what else, persuaded the police that such testimony was already urban legend.

  Jack Rausch was brought in once, then questioned again when the leads dried up. Both times he went willingly, his demeanor serene. He extended his hands for cuffs, and the cops confessed they were only bringing him as procedure, because he had been absent from the regular music session on that night and that night alone. Surprisingly, and even with a kind of sober cheer, Jack stood up under sorrow and civic pressure, staying with rehearsals until George and Dolores brought the matter up to Stephen, said that even if Jack didn’t look suspicious, the repeated questioning did. But to Stephen the boy was beyond misgiving: he learned his lines, worked well with T. Tommy and the Brischords, who remained the intended chorus despite George, who said to hell with innovation and with your all-consuming desire to offend, these days you get women to play the maenads, god damn it, and I can have you five community college girls who can remember lines and chant in unison on short notice.

  Until Stephen conceded, said he would back off, pay the derelicts $100 and three bottles of Richards if and only if we can find a chorus leader worth her salt.

  Which is why he went again to the De Chevre place, this time with Jack Rausch in tow.

  Maia received them from the top of the stairs, Jack having charmed his way past the parents whose grief had turned to cool hostility. But Maia smiled at him, and shook her head, either incredulous at his nerve or already saying no to whatever he asked.

  But the smile raised Stephen’s hopes. Like a good director, he backed toward the door, and marveled at how sweetly Jack approached the girl. Marveling as well that, of the two, Jack Rausch just might be the more beautiful.

  But no, Maia said. And again, no.

  Jack was done with questioning. On the way home he watched the road before them, his eyes veiled by sunglasses, his face inscrutable. Amiably he dodged questions, which became more probing, more personal, and even more futile as Stephen parked the car at the curb and the two of them walked down the winding sidewalk toward the amphitheatre, to be met by George Castille, who laid out further trouble.

  54 Episode: A Note of Dischord

  What George brought to them was the first rupture between mother and son.

  For almost two weeks, Aron had sulked and resisted. He learned the lines, but could not break through to the character. He threatened the god and the maenads, did it with all the force Euripides put in the words two millennia past, but he was still not Pentheus, not quite there in heart and imagination. Between scenes he stood in the wings, smoking and lowering.

  Stephen looked to George. The play had come unmoored with the vanishing of Vincent De Chevre. No Pentheus, no music. Aron had dragged it into a series of words and motions, and now it drifted off course in the last, perilous week before the dress rehearsals.

  Now Stephen kept the cast late. Now he hashed through the problems with a baffled George and Dolores. It was clear that Pentheus and Agave were at great discord, clear by the way Aron delivered the first, scornful speech of the Theban prince:

  I left my kingdom briefly, but the tidings

  of mischief in the city reached me there.

  I heard the Theban women left their homes

  feigning the rites of Bacchus, honoring

  some Dionysus in the wooded hills.

  The krater stands among them, one by one

  they steal away with boys to lonely spots

  and gratify their itches, still pretending

  it is all Bacchic ritual, when in fact

  it’s Aphrodite to their cloven crotches.

  Dolores felt…menaced by it. She felt looked in upon, like Aron was spying or judging. More than anything—even more than her son’s well-being, she wanted to be the “cool mom”

  that Aron’s friends, especially Jack, had claimed she was. Aron had re-directed the words from Pentheus’ bruised Puritanism to a kind of peeping-tom obsession with the imagined hot itches of his own mother.

  It was no place in which Dolores Starr could think of herself.

  When she returned home the night before dress rehearsals, the message from her son surprised only the best impressions she had of herself. It was taped inside the refrigerator door, to the compartment in which she kept the meat. She set the raw steak on the counter and spread the note. Two pages as harsh and venomous as any words of Pentheus.

  Aron spoke of his father, like he did on rare occasions. But he moved beyond that, with unnatural intuitions, and called her out on Koenig and on Stephen before him. His sharp eye uncovered and did not forgive, did not take into account that Dolores’ history was history. But the note continued, its intuitions wilder and deeper:

  Don’t lie any more, Dolores, you have a checkered past and no decency. It’s all hella clear that you haven’t stopped yet, you took my part away, bitch, you made me mortal so you could get your cougar claws on Jack, didn’t you, and my only consolation in this is that he don’t want your old ass, he may of stolen my gf but he is a dog not a retard and I can live with him as long as he don’t hook up with you, which he won’t. So go ahead and play my mother, you cunt, it’s a hard role for you but go thru the motions tear me in pieces like Agave doe
s in the play and just be sure I will see to it you won’t hook up with someone young enough to be your son.

  It was hard to read, hard to imagine it thought.

  She set aside the knife and fork she had brought to the counter, began to tear the uncooked meat with her fingers, her thoughts on the accusation as she brought her dripping fingers to her mouth.

  And something further, coiled deep in her thoughts, surfaced in what she thought at first was sadness that Jack Rausch had stolen her son’s girlfriend. But instantly, and with horror, Dolores recognized she was not sad for her son or for the girl, but for herself.

  She left Aron a note and walked where she needed to go, a winter shawl wrapped around her shoulders though the June night was warm. The hardware shop on Oak Street had a broken window boarded and a light on as the owner, his tools available in the aisles, repaired the damage from the third break-in of the year. A woman squatted on a porch across from the nursing home and glared as Dolores passed, her toddler son ranging up and down the stairs, awake and out past reasonable bedtime.

  Sure that somewhere some kind of god attended, Dolores clutched her son’s note, folded in the pocket of her jeans, and followed the lights toward the next intersection where a small crowd milled beneath a Rite Aid sign, their conversation raucous like a boding of ravens. Three of the women she thought she recognized, all better dressed than those she had generally seen in passing when her car headed from Third to Fifth at a quick cruise, the doors locked and the windows up.

  Then the fourth she knew. Blonde scattering of hair, the image of her brother in shorts and hoodie, weaving on her feet. Maia as marijuanera courted by a brace of brothers and bantering in her father’s worst nightmare. Of course she recognized Ms. Starr at once, but called her Dolores and motioned her in.

  And over the pavement Dolores came to her, as the gods watched in curiosity spiked and disinterested.