Vine: An Urban Legend

by Michael Williams

  Apache was neither interested nor impressed, but Vincent and Maia took up with the new boy immediately, as Billy had nine days before, in the austere sanctuary stripped of raiment and metaphor, where Jack Rausch had been serene and grinning, attentive to the Reverend Peter Koenig, his gaze meandering from the pulpit to the plexiglass windows and the dreaming landscape outside.

  See? Billy whispered to Maia, having made introductions, as Aron briefed Jack on how to create his character, the six rolls of three dice that would determine his strength, intelligence, wisdom, dexterity, and charisma—the basic attributes that, under the game rules, governed all characters as fundamentally as chromosomes. See, Maia? I told you this guy is awesome!

  Aron was unconvinced. He had yearned after Maia for a year now, had tried to ply Vincent’s help in the suit through various briberies. The twins had been friendly, but not in the way Aron wanted. Here, within fifteen minutes, he could see the strong, tidal pull of Jack Rausch. Both De Chevres played up to the new boy, laughed too loudly at his consciously clumsy ignorance of the game rules. Flirted with him as he made the preliminary dice rolls.

  All of the rolls were high. Baffling odds. Two times the rolls maxed out—three sixes, one in 216 chance individually, and taken together, slipping toward a math Aron could not negotiate without paper and a calculator. It was dismally appropriate that Jack should be blessed.

  Aron shrank into his chair, reading the text that would prompt the evening’s play. Jack’s eyes were on him—eager, amiable, intent. He noticed the rest of the players were looking at Jack.

  12 Episode: The Foundling

  It came down to a question of origins. Jack Rausch was darkly handsome and slim, Asiatic of feature, a far cry from the burly Germanic Rausches and only a faint resemblance to the Congressman.

  The Indiana House of Representatives is a respectable body, and the Republican majority of that house is postured even more respectably: legally obedient and publicly asexual. So when Beverly Nguyen, the young, unwed campaign worker for Roy Rausch, began to show in what was apparently the fourth month of her pregnancy, it would, of course, mark the end of her work for the candidate. She was sent back to her people—Vietnamese immigrants living in a large extended-family crowd under one small roof in New Albany. And in most cases, her story would have ended when she left.

  But Roy Rausch confided to his campaign manager, Bucky Trabue, about the girl’s enticements, the light blouses she had purposefully worn in a warm and humid May and how the fan at headquarters had stirred the fabric, how she reached for the topmost shelf and the pamphlets, her hips contraposed and how he watched, bedazzled and helpless, from the amen corner. And how things moved in a way that Roy Rausch claimed and claimed was inevitable until Bucky, a shrewd veteran of more than right-wing political campaigns, recognized it for what it was. And oh, no, Roy, he objected, oh surely not, the kid’s barely of age and you’re married and every Baptist preacher in the district has endorsed you, and after all, she’s Vietnamese, for the love of God…

  At his desk that evening Bucky welsh-combed his thinning hair, drank the syrupy leavings of the morning’s coffee and speculated on how fucking tired he was of covering the tracks of men who talked like Republicans and acted like Democrats. The campaign might keep it veiled, he guessed, unless Adele Rausch found out.

  The Queen Bee. Adele, Whose Hand is Above. The one who wanted her husband Roy in prominent political office, and finding him forty-two and behind schedule, had hired campaign manager, staff, and a dozen workers, nine of whom were males and the other three safely post-menopausal. She rode mistrust as roughshod as ambition, and all it would take was one loose set of lips on the staff, one breath stirring that she could get wind of…

  Bucky suspected it was no longer a matter of days but of hours.

  So to New Albany he went, and spoke to the girl herself because the parents’ English was broken and no amount of slowing down or speaking louder seemed to make them understand, but the girl was fluent and smart, and Bucky hoped to Jesus she was as old as she said she was when she signed on with the campaign. And no, when she asked him point blank, he couldn’t guarantee her safety or that of her child, and couldn’t compromise a clear Republican principle by sending her to the Women’s Clinic in Louisville because Jesus Christ on a pony if that got into the presses it would mean not only the Rausch campaign but his own career forever and ever, so yes, Miss Beverly Nguyen it was time to get the hell out of town and lie low till the most murderous of notions had passed through Adele Rausch and through Roy’s three older sisters.

  At his departure, Beverly Nguyen’s concern rose quickly to panic. As Bucky drove west toward home, lighting his second rationed cigarette of the evening and wondering if he had dodged the bullet (or better yet, had taken it without injury for Roy Rausch), Beverly’s brother Sammy had jump-started the family’s Mercury Cougar, a car older than the girl who would ride in it, clicking on what the Nguyens had thought was its third hundred-thousand of miles when in fact it was its fourth, the odometer having been rolled back by one Lyle Trabue, Bucky’s cousin over in Jeffersonville, in a misdeed completely unconnected to Rausch, Bucky, or any political campaign in southern Indiana, but just indicative of human nature.

  And Beverly, afraid of being spotted leaving town, afraid Adele Rausch already knew and was sending disreputable henchmen in revenge, climbed into the trunk and, over Sammy’s more sensible protests, persuaded her brother to tie the door back down and drive them toward Madison, where their aunt had promised a refuge. Jack Rausch would claim later that the first thing he remembered was that darkness, the smell of oil and the bump of tires on the state road.

  And young Beverly Nguyen singing, soothing her newborn child with an old Paul McCartney lullaby:

  Golden slumbers fill your eyes

  Smiles awake you when you rise

  Sleep pretty darling do not cry

  And I will sing a lullaby…

  …neither of them ever knowing the words were three centuries older.

  But Jack claimed, and his mother confirmed, that as her sweet thin voice moved from chorus to verse, as she held the baby she could not protect and as she wondered how she could give him up, if she could give him up, that her singing broke on the first line of the verse:

  Once there was a way…to get back homeward.

  And for two years, somewhere to the east of all of these things, there was no way to return.

  13 Episode: Taken In

  The baby on the doorstep. The foundling child whose promise is miraculous, heroic.

  Dolores darkened as Aron failed to live up to legend, but across the river, in the ancestral house of the Rausches, a baby showed up and sparked mythological ambitions in the family.

  The three Rausch sisters thought of Moses, of course, but there were others: Oedipus, Perdita, Snow White, and Tom Jones. And though the sisters were not famous for warmth or safe harbor, it was a vein of kindness—too far submerged to be visible but there nevertheless—that prompted them to take the baby in.

  That, and the simple fact that they had seen it coming.

  The Rausch sisters were no longer Rausch in name, but only in allegiance. Theirs was a prominent family, and the girls had insisted on homes within a block of each other, of frequent visits that became eventually constant. You would find them together in the ancestral parlor, playing cards, watching television, comparing shopping coups and husbandly achievements. As they reached their thirties, their marriages, thin to begin with, fell into more private dissolutions. Now one was widowed, two divorced, and all three convergent on their ancient and formidable matriarch, Madeline Rausch of Indiana Republican circles, wealthy and unable to suffer foolery unless it was her own. Which she, of course, had relabeled eccentricity, and was probably right.

  Madeline recognized on the baby the lineaments of her son Roy, the oldest and most highly regarded of her children. She remembered the conversations with Bucky Trabue (whom she loathed but respected), and knew
that her one choice was to accept the infant. She gave out rumors that her youngest daughter, the respectably widowed Ina, had chosen to adopt a child of Asian heritage. Ina obeyed without hesitation, and Jack Rausch was raised by an aunt whom he called mother while knowing otherwise.

  Madeline thought of the child as a changeling. Once, when Jack was no more than three, she watched him at play in Ina’s room, serenely sorting old costume jewelry into piles according to a pattern Madeline sensed was there but veiled by the child’s age or some great distance he had already traveled away from this nest of women.

  Jack looked up at his grandmother, who thought she would fancy him beautiful if he were less her own. And “Maddaw,” he said, his smile almost radiant, the jewelry (she swore) catching sun from the window and glittering in his brown hands like something more than paste and glass, as though his touch itself transformed it into gems.

  She was “Maddaw” to him. She had corrected him when he called her “Grandma” or (even more horribly) “Mammaw.” He was to call her Madeline, as did her other two grandsons. But little Jack blurred the lines of custom, and as irritating as she sometimes found him, Madeline knew this was the one whose affinities were most her own.

  He revealed himself as she watched him in secret, as he had with the gems. At first she thought Jack’s unobserved play was a window into who he really was. But instead, she noticed that he played to an audience as though he sensed her eyes.

  When he was five, Madeline found him at the roll-top desk in the parlor, arranging Italian postcards in a ragged circle. She approached him almost stealthily, her soft steps masked by his lovely, atonal humming. The cards were the photos from the Villa of the Mysteries, a sequence of interior murals that portrayed the life of the god Dionysus, and Madeline took in her breath to see them arranged in their proper order, each frescoed scene leading to the next, as they did on the walls of the villa.

  The guides had told her it probably marked an initiation—a death and rebirth for young women. That it probably told the story of the god and his bride Ariadne, the girl abandoned by a fickle lover on the island of Naxos, who slept the sleep of the dead or dying until the god himself found her, and like the prince in the fairy tale, kissed her into life and wedlock. Because, of course, life and wedlock were much the same thing for some Roman girls, but Madeline had lost interest once the story was told.

  But this time, she heard the story differently. The child’s stubby fingers pointed to figures in the photos, renaming them and retelling their stories. Suddenly, the sleeping Ariadne became mama, though whether that referred to Ina, to the vanished Beverly Nguyen, or to Madeline herself was unclear.

  She sat down by him, drew out the story. She showed him the images of the growing girl as she proceeded from the threshold of the first fresco, in purple gown and carrying an offertory bowl of fruit. Then the priestess, receiving an offering as the demi-god Silenus strained fat and glittering, lyre in hand, at the far edge of the fresco.

  Jack laughed and pointed at the grotesque musician, flapping his lips with farting sounds.

  Then back to the initiate, the girl whirling her purple gown in astonishment, then to Silenus again, this time drunkenly holding up the mirror of a silver bowl to an astonished young satyr, and finally, his head missing where the pigment had fragmented and crumbled, the bronze god recumbent in the arms of his mother.

  Maddaw, the child whispered. Jack n Maddaw.

  Madeline held him more tightly, aware now that she would have to give him up.

  Quickly she guided him through the last images: the girl emerging from the split cavernous darkness, carrying a staff, then lashed and face down in her nurse’s lap, suffering the scourging that led to her being handed the thyrsus, to being prepared for her wedding while Eros held her mirror, this time the silver bowl flattened and smoothed into a flawless reflected glass, wherein she sees herself perfectly for the first and final time.

  The two of them—Jack and his Maddaw—fell silent in contemplating such a scene. Though not a religious woman, though frankly not even spiritual, Madeline clung tightly, trying desperately and at the last moment to shape him into someone who would meet the respectable and predatory standards of her children.

  But the whole house knew. By the next day she knew.

  And Roy Rausch, in concern for the strangeness of this changeling child, enrolled Jack in the Antioch Baptist School, where the Reverend Peter Koenig could begin to wed this initiate to the good believer’s life.

  14 Episode: Isaac Clarke

  Stephen’s past warned him in other, milder ways. Especially as he and George Castille began to map the production of The Bacchae.

  He had first seen the play in Ohio. Not a university play, but an alternate guerrilla theatre, its producer, director, and financier a classmate of his named Isaac Clarke—now a family man and music director in an Episcopal church outside of Akron, but then a bisexual Satanist/organist in another Episcopal church, a boy who wrote bad Rimbaud prose poems and intimidated Stephen by being richer, smarter, and certainly more talented than he could dream.

  Isaac had gotten on the outside of bad mescaline in his second semester at Kent, and gone home to some wealthy suburb of Cleveland, back into a family of bankers who spoiled and did not understand him.

  He returned that spring in a flurry of leaflets. All across the campus the same yellow flyers appeared, stuffed in student mailboxes or stapled to telephone poles, bulletin boards, and almost any wooden surface that would abide them. “Isaac Clarke Presents” took top billing over both Bacchae and Euripides. The girl Stephen was dating at the time—a sly classical studies major from New Jersey—found Clarke’s sheer hubris enough to make her want to attend.

  Stephen milked the connection to impress her, exaggerated his acquaintance with Isaac Clarke in hopes that it would strengthen his acquaintance with the girl. And he succeeded, drawing smiles, a flirtatious touch on his arm, the brush of her lips against his ear as she whispered something about this being Euripides’ final play, and so on until the curtain rose on Isaac Clarke facing away from the audience, clad in only a golden lamé jockey strap.

  The story, which Stephen did not know, was this: Clarke had cast the play with a number of his smoking companions, his boyfriend of the moment—a young hustler out of Cleveland—as a rather addled Pentheus who would probably have forgotten the lines even without the hashish. As it was, the play unfolded like a plague spreading, each scene sprawling over the hoots of the audience.

  You could almost see Isaac Clarke lose control of the proceedings. By the first scene where Dionysus and Pentheus meet on the stage, cues had been dropped, Tireisias had upstaged Cadmus in a tangle of old men, and the chorus had danced an ungainly ballet that was cut short when a pair of drunken girls in the front row tossed a half-full bottle of Boone’s Farm into the maenads’ hymn to the ecstatic life with the god. All of this as the audience—college and high school students, young townies, hippies from Cleveland and the gods knew where—talked back to the actors as though they were egging on it all.

  It reached its climax when, in his first scene with the god, Pentheus forgot his lines, standing in a kind of hempen stupor. Well, stranger, he began, I believe that women might find you comely, and no doubt that is why you’ve come to Thebes.

  That to a whoop from somewhere near the back of the theatre, and a surge of laughter that overwhelmed the dialogue. And then the sound collapsed into a baffled silence, in which everyone seated could hear Dionysus feeding Pentheus lines.

  You must never have been a wrestler with that flowing hair…And Pentheus repeating it to the rising derision of the drunken girls, of the townies, of the hooters in the back row, the wronged play staggering toward the horrific final scenes in which the god’s followers tear Pentheus apart and bring his body back to Thebes in a blind ecstasy.

  But of course by that time, the play itself was wounded. When Agave laments the death of her son, allowing that it was Dionysus who ruined us, someone—p
erhaps the same heckler who had ignited the evening’s long ridicule—shouted out, Well, you done a pretty good job of ruinin’ him as well!

  After the play, as the couple walked back to campus, Stephen began to apologize for having brought her into Isaac Clarke’s folly. But this much he remembered: as he began to speak, she shook her head, silenced him with a lifted finger, and explained that no, really, it was quite all right, that in ways it was the god descending. Though he saw her again on occasion, they never dated anymore, and he once joked to George Castille that he was the first man in the modern age to have a romance undermined by a Greek god.

  Oh, honey, George had replied, rolling his eyes. Perhaps by a Greek god, but not by a goddamned Greek.

  Now, with the first company auditioned, chosen, and assembled, Stephen wondered if he, too, was about to ruin Dionysus. George had already tried to wrest the play from him, conducting reconnaissance among the theatre students at the community college and the high school, weeding out (he claimed) the would-bes and the otherwise untrustworthy, complaining all the while that The Bacchae was not a play for this town at this time.

  Stephen wondered, as he had sat bored through the initial auditions, whether it was a play that could ever be staged again. He had cast almost to George’s bidding: the De Chevre twins, who (according to George) were the best of the community college actors, would play Agave and Pentheus, Maia mothering her golden-haired brother. Aron Starr, stocky, a little sullen, and high-maintenance like his mother, would play the god.

  The first read-through already presented problems. None of the principals were cooperative: Maia balked at playing her brother’s mother, Vincent felt that he should play Dionysus, and Aron was leery of the read’s taking place in the apartment of the mildly disreputable Castille.