Vine: An Urban Legend

by Michael Williams

  On the other hand, Jack Rausch would come willingly. She knew it from the look of him, and from the way he had talked to her on top of Hamlet’s castle. For a moment she startled, as a glance in the mirror revealed something staring back at the recesses of sight. She had that moment of hovering, as the reflection cleared and there was nobody behind her. The play would be the thing, indeed, and she hoped to catch more than the conscience of luminous Jack.

  29 Episode: As the Muses Watch

  It was all craziness according to Aron Starr.

  They met at his place, over the game, and, as Maia had predicted, he was the last of them holding out.

  The Muses arrived before the mortals. Melpomene and Thalia, in their idea of a joke, slid ethereally behind the dramatic masks that Dolores Starr kept on her wall as conversation pieces nobody ever talked about. They thought it was especially funny that Melpomene’s mask was smiling and Thalia’s tearful, though Polymnia cautioned that such humor was too broad and obvious. So the sisters waited and bickered in silence, until Billy and Apache joined in Vincent’s plan, Erato having seduced their dreams. A boy can be drawn by his dick into all kinds of adventure, so the Muses had given them images, mostly centered on Maia and the gullibilities of Baptist girls.

  But Aron, cool and resistant, ever the game-master mapping escapade, pointed out the silliness of the venture.

  Antioch Baptist Church was a kind of fortress against the world. Rehearsals at its theatre were protected, as were the children who performed in its family-friendly dramas—protected according to the principle that the world out there is made up of all kinds of seductions, and you know what happens.

  It made the Baptists tighten things, understandably. Would make nigh impossible what his friends wanted to do.

  But Aron did not see why they wanted to kidnap Jack Rausch. It would stir up commotion, he said, and give that Bible-thumping bunch something to rampage about, not that they needed it. Jack might or might not come willingly, and if he didn’t, this was kidnapping for real, a punishable crime, didn’t you all know it?

  But even if Jack went along, what did they plan to do once they had him?

  So arguments began, until the Muses settled on them all. Breathed spirit into their ambitions.

  Vincent pointed out the boy’s charisma. That it was more than dice rolls, in case Aron had forgotten. Girls liked Jack, and there was something about him: he would stand well in the chorus, perhaps even lead it.

  You have completely forgotten, Aron replied, that the chorus is women, and even if Jack Rausch likes that kind of thing I can’t imagine our chorus leader in drag…

  To which the boys all laughed, reminding him that this was Euripides, that the women in Greek drama were played by men.

  And embarrassed, cornered by ridicule, Aron asked if that was Mr. Castille’s idea, because you know,

  And no, Billy said, not at all, and don’t be a homophobe, Aron, or we will simply trade you for Jack. And Mr. Castille will be here soon, and do you want him to hear what you said? But Aron was no longer listening, because he was angered no end—the part about trading him for Jack, as Thalia figured it would when she suggested the barb to Billy.

  So now it was time for Maia to intervene.

  We want him here for good reason, Aron, she urged. You know Jack plays bass, and does it well: he’s been jammin’ for weeks with Vinnie, and they might even put together a band in the fall. But you also know that, right now, the play needs original music, not some CD of Qawwali like the dude sang with Eddie Vedder, or like the Ravi Shankar shit that Mr. Thorne got high to in the ’60s.

  And Aron beginning to smile because she was right and she was funny, and they all had thought it, and Maia made him smile no matter what she said.

  They had nudged him into tactics by the time George Castille arrived. George seemed distracted, they thought. Beaten down or a little shaken at the foundations. At any rate, he said no to the enterprise. But the girls had laid the groundwork, Muses and Maia. They worked on him. He hated Our Town and Baptists, but like Aron before him, he first saw no point in a kidnapping venture. He softened, however, at the prospect of comic disguise.

  Maia was bold as a tenth muse of Rhetoric. Though none of them had met the Reverend Peter Koenig, Maia painted him in dragon colors, his school as a kind of locked stables that pent up the god and the winged horse. Koenig was, they thought, a confirmed hater of Catholics, women, gender-benders and Harry Potter—the kind of sweeping condemnation that gave them an easy villain and earned them convenient grounds for agreement whenever they gathered. And there was nothing ill about Koenig and Antioch Baptist that George Castille would not believe, and by the time Maia had got done with describing, and the Muses had filled him with insufflations of liberal and libertarian righteousness, the old actor was in on the ground floor of the planning.

  He was cautious enough, however, to step away from it, to remind them that the abduction part of venture, as he called it, would be conceived and performed by students. When it came to lending a hand with that enterprise, he would love to, but he didn’t want to.

  The cast agreed and said they understood. They ran through the evening’s reading, which had improved on all fronts except Aron’s Dionysus. George listened in silence because part of him had given up, while the other part drifted unsettled through his previous night’s dreaming. And when he stepped out for a smoke, Vincent and Maia produced the copies of the other play, distributed it to Aron, Apache, and Billy with a kind of submerged hilarity.

  The questions of why would be answered later by the twins, as the whole party met to conspire over questions of how. Vincent whispered not to worry, that it would not have to be just the five of them. He had enlisted other help, he said, but could not explain before George Castille came back into the room, smelling of tobacco and instruction, having purposefully forgotten that once rehearsals were over, his cast would be bound for felony.

  30 Episode: A Tour of Mothers

  He visited his mother because of her capacity for noise. He was not told this, and the Rausches framed the trips to see Beverly Nguyen as gestures of kindness and a nod to biology.

  Although of driving age now, Jack was never allowed to make the trip on his own. Chauffeured by the Congressman’s driver, he would be turned and taken a roundabout path on the way to his mother. There she gave him cold coffee and bahn choux, assured him that she had given him up for adoption because the Rausches could provide what a child deserved. That his father, some boy named Donny Sabathia, had been killed in the first Bush war, leaving a pregnant girlfriend who no longer could keep the baby. That knowing this, she had set the child afloat on a river of dreams, downstream toward the palaces of the man for whom she worked, whose vision of America could be admired by a daughter of immigrants.

  Jack had listened, aware it was a lie and loving her for making a story to guard him. Out of the whispers of aunts and the surveillance of chauffeurs and state troopers, he had figured who his father was. Had seen through Beverly’s fictions for years, had departed each visit with her embraces and manufactured tears. His soul had grown away from hers: she only knew him through conjecture and myth.

  She cried at the idea of him, and he visited the idea of her, and on those grounds they made affectionate truce.

  While Jack Rausch received his mother’s baffled welcome, Aron would have given his child support to imagine a fallen warrior as his own father. Robert Starr’s suburban home was loud with a young second wife and two toddler stepbrothers Aron still confused with each other. It was a place of dispersed attentions, starkly in contrast with Dolores’ domineering world, but not better, not really.

  When Aron was younger, he had loathed organized sports, his brief, horrible forays into church, and three weeks in the Boy Scouts. Fortunately, all his enlistments ended early, when his mother lost interest in her own role of soccer mom.

  But in the theatre they had joined desires. His first costume had fit, had left the feel of forced stitche
ry and cheap velour along his arms. At the time he thought that, even after he took off the doublet and tunic, he would still be MacDuff’s child, would still speak immortal lines and be shaped by them. And it did not matter to him that he forgot the lines a week after the play had closed: love of the spotlight had bonded him with his mother, as they both looked to the magic that transformed them into someone else.

  While Aron Starr basked in his mother’s attentions, wore the children’s costumes and wrangled for speaking parts in her productions, Stephen Thorne had come to an age when he welcomed negligence.

  Grateful for Caller-ID, for Muriel’s fear of the city that kept her suburban and distant, he picked up the phone on occasion because that, too, was a masquerade, a costume in a performance that cleansed him, made the whiskey taste a little better for his efforts.

  This day, though, would make the whiskey more plentiful. There were lines in the Thirtieth Hexagram, one he had just finished reading, with perplexity, when the phone rang.

  Muriel was on about the chorus. How homeless men were unreliable, prone to violence. How it might not be this way for his friends, but for hers their presence would be poisonous, a gate-killer. How she had seen the type when she visited him that time (what was it?) a year ago, and how Stephen had no idea what he was in for.

  He could benefit from her experience, she told him. And it was just like him to forego wisdom.

  He calmed her, lied to her he would consider, and backed her off the phone. Then returning to the I Ching, taking a breath to steady himself, he read again the commentary.

  Nine at the top means:

  The king uses him to march forth and chastise:

  Then it is best to kill the leaders

  And take captive the followers. No blame.

  He refreshed his whiskey and dug into his desk drawer for a short, consolatory bag of reefer. He considered himself a chastiser. That part was easy. And perhaps the killing and the taking captive had to do with the brewing play.

  Surely that was it. Like Euripides’ vengeful god, he had been kept in a prison by the smallness of this city, and the time for release was coming. The play itself was liberation enough—liberation in all of its disobedience and mayhem. And the casting was making the prospects better all the time.

  Surely the chorus would cut him free of bonds.

  31 Episode: The King of Antioch

  As Our Town prepared production at the Antioch Baptist Church, the Muses reverted to cold marble, their positions changing once again in the procession. Outside the glass casing and the climatically sealed museum, the temperature rose and the weather became unstable.

  This city hugs the river as though it is wringing the last moisture from it. When the summer comes, windows and eyeglasses steam over when you step outside before noon. By June, the visitors come into the museum in a haze of condensation and morning sweat, and they are thankful for the cool.

  It is worse by the river, of course, but relentless throughout the town. Even its gated and manorial eastern suburbs shimmer like mirages when the temperature slides toward sweltering. The old neighborhoods are run-down but better in summer weather, with their century-old trees and vertical town-house shadows. But wherever you go, it is hot in Louisville. Day after day, the chariot drives through the spaces of heaven, the god’s golden hair flowing wildly in a wind out of the east. And people go inside. They incline to laziness and spectator sports. And the sun gives way to the humid and excessive night.

  Sunday mornings, even before the heat becomes uncomfortable, a caravan of yellow buses coasts in irregular traffic down the main north-south thoroughfare, on I-65 until a southeast neighborhood opens into the demesne of Antioch Baptist Church, grounds spread over both sides of the interstate so that a returning Jesus might have a wide landing strip in case his copilot was neither all-powerful nor all-seeing.

  Churches for singles and couples, seniors and the youth. Families and for those who had not bred yet.

  In all of these echelons, the Reverend Peter Koenig ranked high.

  It was Koenig in charge of dramatic productions, though he never visited the stage. After all, old notions died hard about the theatre’s counterfeit, and as he justified the plays as pageant and instruction, Koenig understood why it took his faith so long to bury actors on holy ground.

  But if there was a play to produce, it would have to be Our Town. There were things hard to address at Antioch: Midsummer Night’s Dream had been too bawdy, not to mention its brush with the supernatural. Harvey, as well. The supernatural part, that is. And Death of a Salesman criticized the American Way of Life, while Miracle Worker featured uncomfortable people.

  Koenig hated the whole whitewashed image of living that made for avoiding, for fugitive and cloistered virtue. And yet the sick soul, the melancholy spirit, seemed unmanly and diseased. People grubbed in rat-holes instead of living in the light. They manufactured fears, majored on every unwholesome kind of misery. Between that and happy evasion, Koenig found himself slightly more liable to prefer the light.

  There was a scene, though, in Our Town, that always troubled him—a moment when the Stage Manager is asked, by two rather shrill inquisitors, whether the town has a place for the pursuit of social justice or artistic beauty: his answer to both, a kind of aw shucks, I reckon we get by as best we can, was more accusation than answer. It was like the questioners were suspects just for asking.

  It made Koenig wonder when he had passed from challenging things he didn’t like to defending things he didn’t particularly care for. Seminary school, maybe. Or maybe his first church here in town, for he was not from here, like Antioch’s flock of imports. Louisville, however, had become his town, their town. Our Town. Writ large and, though at the turn of a different century, hankering back to times previous like a humid, river-swamped Grover’s Corners.

  Not long after he arrived here to attend seminary, Koenig had seen a film, already a decade old, called Louisville: City of the Seventies. And now, the millennial year long past, the title was still appropriate. Segregated largely by race and almost entirely by class, it was a cluster of small towns, balkanized by high school districts that had nothing to do with where you went to school but everything with who you were. He looked out at his congregation, 15,000 on a good Sunday, and figured you could draw a crowd that large and that overwhelmingly white only at a Stanley Cup game.

  Not only the whiteness troubled him, though. Antioch was too big for his tastes these days. There was less and less of a personal touch, he figured. He had always found more room for God with the accoutrements stripped away, with the friction of soul against soul.

  Roy Rausch’s phone call, forwarded that morning, had rubbed the pastor another way. Resentful at being put on hold while Koenig pursued what he claimed were other pastoral concerns but was actually a sandwich order, the State Representative grumbled through arranging a counseling appointment for his nephew Jack, a principal actor in Our Town.

  The boy was supposedly adopted from somewhere in Asia. But the Rausch lineaments and lineage was apparent, and everyone’s silent guess was that Roy was the father.

  If he’d been a Democrat, they’d have brought it up.

  Koenig stood up and walked to the front of his desk. He never greeted visitors from behind it. Now, waiting for Jack Rausch to enter, he turned toward the print on the wall—a reproduction of Rubens’ Christ’s Entry into Jerusalem. He had been told the painting was “too Catholic” by someone with a lot of money, but he had held his ground and kept it in the office. Now he placed his hands in his pockets and smiled at the almost frenzied pace of the piece, Our Lord and Savior riding the donkey like a hulking jockey in the midst of a gauntlet of palm fronds, the beginning of the Passion in some crowded rush, the celebrants crouched muscular around the outsized rider, encircling Him, fanning Him, spreading branches and clothing in His path, for Blessed be the King that cometh in the name of the Lord, Peter Koenig whispered, the verse from Luke that they always quoted on Palm Sunday
.

  Peter heard the door open in the outer office, the pleasant and saccharine greeting his wife Maraleese used in her secretarial role, a polite young male voice in response. And a darker verse came to mind. And when he was come near, he beheld the city, and wept over it, Saying, If thou hadst known, even thou, at least in this thy day, the things which belong unto thy peace! but now they are hid from thine eyes.

  32 Episode: Cartouches

  Each young person to come into Peter Koenig’s office was a cartouche. The staff and younger clergy frowned when he said that, but only because they did not know the word. Not because it wasn’t so.

  The cartouche, Koenig would explain, was the oval in Egyptian inscriptions. It indicated that the text inside was a royal name. It shaded how you read the hieroglyphs, the signs, creating meaning by sound, by the associations with each picture, by how those pictures spoke to each other.

  This made for complex translation, he told them. He confessed that he did not know first-hand, but that others—experts in the field—had told him so in seminary. It seems that the signs meant a number of things simultaneously, like the intents and motives of people.

  Those blurred intents and motives were why Peter Koenig kept open his office doors during all conferences. Why his wife was his secretary. His protection, like the elliptical border of the cartouche, was designed to fend and ward off evil.

  With dangers set aside, Koenig could read in comfort the faces and gestures of advisees, move beyond what was said into what was meant, the difficult translation of counseling. It had been Bob Dylan, if he remembered rightly, who had talked about how your debutante knows what you need / but I know what you want.