Here is what happened. Stephen had received a job offer at the local community college, an adjunct drama coach under the command and direction of George Castille. Castille, was an actor of some talent who had never risen above his city, playing bit roles regionally and larger roles at home. He was one of those artists who grew to middling size in a small pond: it helped to be born somewhere in Illinois, because Louisvillians had all decided you couldn’t be any good and be a native. So he had his exotic origins, and he could also charm and strongarm in a way that mimicked what the gods dispense.
If you did not look too closely, you would think George was better than he was. And Stephen did not look closely at first. George was obviously homosexual, and if it had taken flirting a little, taken anything just short of actual congress, Stephen might have gone that way for a theatre job. But George simply wanted an assistant director. Stephen even wondered whether he should be insulted, but he jumped at the job.
And Dolores was jumping at her own good fortune. She enrolled at once at the same school, figuring she had worked the casting couch already. There would be roles for her, she was certain. Ophelia or Isabella or even Medea. The dreaming fell short when they staged Our Town again, and Stephen passed her over for the same Emily Webb role she had played in high school. She auditioned, played the motions and emotions, only to see other girls’ names on the call-back sheet George Castille posted two weeks before the first readings began.
She blamed Castille. Took her whine to Stephen and found out otherwise. Why he owned up to it is anyone’s guess, but maybe it was just the moment when a man comes clean because dragging the world down with you beats living in the world that’s up and running.
It marked the last act of Thorne and Webb. For a while Dolores got to play the Medea, majored on the hell hath no fury. She wedged notes in the door of Stephen’s small office, going on about her solitude, her isolation, his broken pledges and her lost innocence, hinting at backlash and vengeance.
One afternoon, locked in the office, Stephen watched as her silhouette passed across the far side of the door’s frosted glass, as she pressed her face against it, trying vainly to see inside. He held his breath and wished for complete silence.
She was a girl possessed, willing to lay all things at the altar of her vengeance. If her child had been born, she would have sacrificed him then and there.
But Stephen was in the hands of the god by now, protected and guided. And Erato, most immodest of the Muses, found another man, a modest one, to catch the eye of Dolores Webb and to haul in her suspect sanity. This was a seminary student, an idealist who took up some of the time between Stephen and the Robert Starr she would marry five years later. Because Dolores was transformed by loves, on her way from wronged woman to anti-muse, serial companion to disappointments. Perhaps she pitched in with the failure.
So all along, up to this spring night in the park, Stephen had been dodging the thunderbolt. The god had reserved a place for him.
But immortal attention is rarely the best of things.
8 Episode: Of Returns and Imagined Scandals
Hold to him in truth and loyalty, the I Ching had told him. Advice of half the readings, but heeded this time, in a convergence of need and old connection. Still, it was hard to return here, to the scene of his transgressions.
George Castille had been the wise one. Masking all things sexual, steering away from high schools. Visiting only to audition for youthful parts, curbing himself to the teacher’s lounge, its vending machines and clandestine ashtrays. It was safer that way in a city like this, a metropolitan area of nearly a million but at its heart a church-haunted small town where innocent conversations could flow right into witch-hunts. Today George would be at the school, only because Stephen had asked him to join the production.
The teachers’ lounge lay down the long central hall, and Stephen passed by rows of paint-thickened, khaki-colored lockers, expecting a band of maenads or Iroquois to burst forth, through whom he would have to run a gauntlet. It hadn’t dawned on him yet that only George and Dolores Webb—Dolores Starr, he reminded himself—would remember a scandal from thirty-five years back. A man likes to cut a wicked figure, and he was a bit disappointed when the facts dawned on him.
He had almost settled to the task at hand when Dolores come out from her classroom and regarded him in what he half hoped was still a hostile light.
The hexagram had said:
Truth, like a full earthen bowl:
Thus in the end
Good fortune comes from without.
And “Dolores,” Stephen said. “Dolores. How are you?”
“What brings you here, Stephen?” she asked. “Drama or dalliance?”
Stephen tried smiling. “Is there a third choice?”
Dolores had strength enough to carry grudges. Nor was she too much worse for wear outwardly. Blonde hair tends to resist gray, and only her nose suffered the droop and distention of years, that drying in their forties that makes thin women look like apple dolls.
Stephen stuck to business, explained what had brought him to the school, smiled and asked after her son, hoping she would take the lure.
“Aron? Aron’s well, thank you for asking,” she said. “Talented, but a bit green as an actor. To be expected at his age. Still, I wouldn’t be surprised if George has him in mind for a role in your little production.”
It all bothered him, but Stephen stuck on the little. “There are no little productions, Dolores. You know the saying.” And then, because he could: “The part of Agave is still open, by the way. Greek tragedy always has plum roles for middle-aged women, you know. Men played them first.”
She wished him icily well as the bell rang. Slipped back into her classroom, right behind a straggling pair of students in letter jackets. Stephen wondered that boys still wore those things, then waded through loitering scholars on his way to Castille and the lounge.
He did the math on Aron, and it still worked out. The kid took his stepfather’s name when Dolores rushed into the one connection that ended in marriage, bad as Stephen had heard it was. Everyone had guesses as to the boy’s sire, but Aron was what? seventeen? eighteen at the oldest?
Stephen was clear by at least a decade. He still couldn’t pin down why he went through the counting.
9 Episode: Of Returns and Invented Scandals
George Castille was sitting in a corner of the lounge, smoking Winstons and offering the opinion that The Bacchae wouldn’t fly this summer. Stephen tried wishing away the silk bandanas and the clip-on earring, but Castille delighted in playing to an audience, flaming the old school with safe effrontery.
He may not have been a great actor, but he was good enough to scandalize his public.
“If it was up to me, Stephen, and purely up to me,” he boomed, gesturing with the cigarette, “I would say, ‘have at it, and god damn the consequences.’”
Two of the younger teachers, seated by a vending machine, looked up from their conversation at the god damn—something about peer review and planning period and students named Harris and Rausch. Stephen lowered his voice, hoping to set better tone and volume, but George wasn’t having it.
“You know what they’re like here, Stephen. Nothing will be said about it, because the Festival directors are all professed liberals and freedom-of-expression types. You know: ‘We’ll fight for your right to say piss because it’s justified by the plot and character.’ Makes them feel good. They can go home and listen to NPR without that nagging sense of uselessness.”
“I’m going to do The Bacchae, George. And you know they’ll back me on it. It’s Euripides, for God’s sake.”
“Euripides, Eumenides, like the old Greek woman told her tailor son. It’s classic as it comes, I’ll grant you, but there’s sex and cross-dressing, honey, and what’s more, it’s theologically unkempt. No Protestant Jesus steps in and makes things right. It’s the twenty-first century, honey, where we burn ancient homos and heretics in the board rooms. You’ll make
it worse for grants and donations with your pagan romp, and who knows? I might have been intending to exhume my critically acclaimed Hamlet next summer.”
He rolled his eyes, snuffed the cigarette and produced another, offering the packet as usual to Stephen. Who declined, as usual.
The young teachers backed out of the lounge, whispering.
“I’m set in my ways, George,” Stephen allowed. “And I know I’ve almost outlasted you on this, or you wouldn’t be here. I’m more stubborn in my declining years, I suppose.”
“Oh, aren’t you, though! That’s why I’ll be the better human being, though you will have casting problems as well. I don’t know any good amateur Agaves, and I’d shudder to make a teen-aged girl crouch and crone in the role.”
“I broached it to Dolores on the way in. She seemed not taken.”
“It’s because you have a way with her, Stephen. She is still Emily Webb when she looks in the mirror, though everyone else is seeing Myrtle Webb, for God’s sake. The son, by the way, is not a horrid actor. I’ve used him in minor speaking parts at the college, and I’ll arrange for you to talk to him. Dolores knows, and has given her consent. He’s a little heavy, but he’d make a decent young god.”
“She knew, then?”
George pushed his Palin eyeglasses down the bridge of his nose and peered at his old friend over the lenses. “Beware, good Stephen,” he warned ironically. “You’re still the cloudiest one of us all.”
10 Episode: Night of the Panther
She knew she had absolved Stephen Thorne. She had no idea when she had done so, because it involved no conscious act of will, this forgiveness, but was simply a branch of the current that had taken her to where she was, to a vantage point from which she saw him as disheveled and dumpy and graying and in need of amnesty.
In the hall Delores had played the role of wronged, deflowered girl, because it was a role worth playing and because it played young, and she enjoyed the freshness of it, the drama and the conviction that had made Stephen feel guilty and uneasy. She had seen it in his eyes, and had nourished herself on the look. But she knew that he had come to choose another player for another role, and she hoped it would be Aron, and that for his first principal role, her son would play a god.
Leaning against the locker she yearned for a drink, but felt peace with the direction of things.
Dolores knew that there were speculations as to Aron’s father. Nobody thought it was Ronnie Starr, a ne’er-do-well smelling of graft and pomade, who had passed through her life shortly after the boy’s birth, leaving the scarcest of ripples and a surname to remind her she had not imagined a husband.
And a former husband was good, was anchoring and almost respectable. Because her life had not always been so: back in the early ’90s, unmoored and marginal, Dolores Webb had imagined the Night of the Panther.
Living alone in a cottage a long commuter’s ride from her first job as a teacher’s aide, Dolores had battened on ice cream and cheap Chablis, a solitary existence that time and again pushed her from melancholy to near crazy. She rationed her cartons of Winston Lights, watched television with reception on only two channels, and listened to Prince and Duran Duran until her thoughts whelmed with sadness and lust and failed promise.
It was one of those nights, buzzed but not yet drunk on the wine, she sat on the porch in a temperate spring and heard a coughing sound, a tremor of bushes from the copse beside the driveway. The cat emerged from the shadow and stood on the moonlit crest of her yard, its eyes calm and alien. Dolores’ first shock at seeing a predator on her lawn subsided into curiosity, then under its gaze, into a strange, removed serenity of her own. She clutched her open dress in the front, recalling the story of some disastrous, feral attack on a girl in these parts fifty years, a century ago. Decided it did not matter. Rose and stumbled in the rising, then surprisingly steady for the wine, she drifted over the silvered grass as the animal, lowering its front legs almost submissively, approached her with the pivoting gait of a jungle creature, which she knew it was not, could not be.
Its muzzle smelled of fresh blood, was crusted and sticky against her neck as Dolores cradled the big head. The eyes were glittering, opaque, and filled with a deep, heart-rending intelligence that might have been the animal’s nature or simply her own imagining. She should have been afraid, she thought later, but not now, the moment passing tidally over her, over the both of them, as borne on an impulse she would write off later as a dream provoked by alcohol, she slid onto the ground, her arms around the creature’s neck, her legs spreading as she lifted her skirt, raised her legs and surrendered.
In the morning, covered in dew in the uncut grass, she was shamed by her dreaming. Dreams are unaccountable, she thought. You cannot shape them out of the wild subterranean rivers from which they arose. As the years and wine bottles passed, she would forget this compromise, this lapse of her sentinels, only to think of it six, seven summers later, after a long sentence of celibacy and solitude, when she missed the monthly bleeding and went, after the second month, to her doctor, a kind and discreet old general practitioner, who, along with Dolores Webb, was the first to wonder the name of the man who had fathered the child in her womb.
For a while she stood over Aron’s crib at night, trying to conjure maternal instinct and coming up with anxiety. Wished it was fear for the child. That would somehow be motherly. Instead, she recognized it as a kind of haunting, like the one she had felt on the moon-spangled grass of her lawn. Aron seemed like a changeling, sullen in his bassinette. Still, she wanted to keep him as her shrine’s guardian, to keep him a boy always.
There was menace in the nightly vigils. Hard to bear while thinking well of yourself. So as the boy grew, Dolores pushed the memories under and fashioned more suitable ones, ones in which she brushed back the soft hair from the infant’s face and they both played the roles acceptable: he the god in the cradle, and she his proper and foster mother.
11 Episode: The Game Begins
The glitter of jewels on the table. Rare harvest from Asian mines. Resolving into dice, into what Polly and her sisters would call tesserae, astragali, knucklebones.
The hoard of Aron Starr, who was waiting for his comrades and writing mysteries in a spiral notebook.
He looked better than his mother let on. Dark hair from the reputed father—whether Ronnie Starr indeed or some mysterious interloper—and a physique that tended toward the stocky rather than the heavy. Prominent nose, small brown eyes with a hint of sneak and calculation. The features of a supporting actor.
He awaited his friends—Apache Downs, Billy Shepard, and the De Chevre twins—for the game the lot of them played every Tuesday night, ritual in its regularity and course of action.
The dice lay scattered on papers, on old and clumsily illustrated books, on a map superimposed with geometric grids. Unlikely materials giving rise to story—a chain of fragments and episodes, linked together only by sequence. Each one present at the table breathed life in and through the mask of a character. They took on Nordic roles—Tolkien roles—of knight or wizard, elf or dwarf, to participate in an imagined world in which Aron Starr was a good-natured god. Part drama, part myth, part community of souls, the story flowed from player to player like divinity through the hands of the poets.
There were students more polished and popular who thought these Tuesday nights and role-playing games were trivial and sad. But this group who assembled in Aron’s basement was not the general band of adolescent nerds and outcasts.
Though Apache Downs played close to type. Along with the benign and sparse-bearded Billy Shepard, Apache was Aron’s classmate, named by hippie parents, christened into general strangeness from an early age. He hulked over video games and SF movie listings, dressed as a Star Wars rebel for the conventions. Even learned manufactured languages—Klingon, of course, and Sindarin Elvish.
Neither he nor Billy, though, figured much in what would come to pass. They were secondary characters, tributaries, Rosencrantzes an
d Guildensterns to the thing of the play.
The De Chevre twins, on the other hand, were older, physically beautiful, and more gifted. Aron had noticed Maia at once, two years ahead of them at the high school, blonde, radiant, and unattainable. Vincent was, in his own way, as lovely as his sister: the same golden cascade of hair and the sorcery of hazel eyes. It was no accident that Maia played a magic-user in the game and her brother a druid: witchery paced before them, and hearts bowed down to one, or the other, or both.
Apache was a fighter, and Billy a thief. And Aron governed it all, for the idea behind such games is that the players assume roles in a fictional setting, the story unfolding according to the decisions they make and the chance element of dice rolls. In short, it is an improvisational drama that one of the players, the game master, plans out, directs and umpires.
Aron’s game centered on a rescue. The party of characters had set out to rescue the heir to a mythical kingdom, a prince ensorcelled and trapped in an underground labyrinth. Aron’s four friends—Apache and Billy, Maia and Vincent—formed the core of the adventuring party. Sometimes others would join the game, dipping in and out of the story in cameo appearance, their importance fleeting and slight.
But nothing trivial on this Tuesday night, for Billy Shepard brought with him a young man he had met at the Antioch Baptist Church where his parents worshipped and he sat and bided his time through tedious Biblical passages and sermons. Jack Rausch was the most interesting creature to pass through the doors of Antioch, and Billy had known it instantly. So this night, pleased with his coup of friendship, he introduced Jack to the band of friends.
Vine: An Urban Legend Page 3
