Vine: An Urban Legend

by Michael Williams

  Melpomene: Over Mrs. Gibbs’ protests, Emily returns to her 12th birthday, where Americans live most of their lives. But it seems that everything overwhelms her, that she’s undone by all she took for granted. She chooses to go back to the numbing comfort of the grave, says goodbye to the world in a speech that always seems to bring people to tears, no matter how much it is contrived and engineered to squeeze out every sniffle and saline drop.

  The world, poor dead Emily tells us, is too wonderful for anyone to understand: “Oh, earth, you’re too wonderful for anyone to realize you. Do any human beings ever realize life while they’re in it?—every, every minute?”

  Thalia: Of course not, girl. If they did it would be unbearable. Oblivion soothes the nerves. Which may be why you love this play. Because at the end, the actors all decide that life was sad and happy at the same time, wonderful and bittersweet. And all together, the dead start to wean themselves away from life, getting the ol’ cosmic perspective, I suppose.

  Or I reckon, as the Stage Manager might say.

  Melpomene: But at play’s end, George, Emily’s husband, returns to weep at her grave. And to him the dead condescend, as does the Stage Manager to all of us, telling us all to go home and get a good night’s sleep.

  Thalia: All a good show, small town family values and good old Middle Amurrica. Entertaining, even moving in a tame way. Though tonight it will go differently at Antioch. Tonight it will not be how the play turns out.

  Polymnia: And no matter the performance, it is never how the dead let go.

  Remember, daughters of Memory?

  First they set our sarcophagus by the roadside. It was custom in northern Italy at the time. And we felt the weight and the lost heat of the body behind our procession, something in the dark beginning to simmer with decay and scavenging life. Fetor and liquescence, I am sure, but it is long past and now I remember only the boiling, the crackle of insect life and the slow, smokeless burning. Above all, the eddy of energy against the marble interiors, the old animula vagula blandula, the pale little wandering soul, or maybe just the body’s last refusal. And the thing moved, slowly at first among the remains and along the inner walls of the sarcophagus, but then more urgently, battering the marble, its cries whistling like a wind out of nowhere as it whirled more quickly, more desperately, confined in a narrow space. Like a bird battering itself in panic against a cage, it buffeted against us…

  Thalia: It startled me, because it was not supposed to end like this. I mourned for the animula, my smiling mask shaking in the relief of my hand…

  Polymnia:…while the rest of us listened—still, pale, embedded—as the spirit eventually gave up, as its movement dwindled and stopped at last. None of this you see in Grover’s Corners or at Antioch, where Peter Koenig and at least two tiers of ministers and assistant ministers dance attendant on rehearsals. No wonder Our Town puts people in the seats. The death it shows you was bearable, clean and sculpted. It is the slow decline of autumn and a waiting for eternity, not a seething in narrow space that ends nowhere.

  36 Episode: The Road to Antioch

  They threatened him with leaving the production.

  Stephen drummed his fingers on his knee and looked across the table. “This doesn’t show much commitment on your part.”

  “Oh, but we think it does, Mr. Thorne,” Vincent replied. “The play needs music. We need a driving bass line, and Jack Rausch is just the one to do it.”

  “I have no objections to him,” Stephen said. “He seems like a good kid, with plenty of looks and charisma. We could even find him a role in the play, on those virtues alone. But I object to being arm-twisted by some kind of amateur actors’ strike.”

  Maia leaned back and narrowed her eyes. But Vincent, ever soothing, spoke words of reconcilement until Stephen smiled, knowing he was being cozened. The twins had plans, that Stephen himself would go with them to Antioch, providing the arguments and leverage to wrest Jack Rausch from his prison and onto the stage in the park.

  He wondered who was guiding this venture. He felt as though Vincent had handed the reins to him, as director and prince of the process. There would be, at one level or another, a facing of Peter Koenig, but Stephen felt armed with enough dramatic knowledge and artistic outrage to confront that dragon.

  So convinced he was of his rightness that he let Vincent’s enigmatic statement—that Aron was arranging the rescue—go unheeded. Until Vinnie’s Volkswagen Eurovan unloaded in front of the church, and the heavy, lamé-clad article stepped forth, followed by an unlikely thiasos he would eventually know as the Brischords—two mulleted white people and a black man resplendent in a corona of picked Afro—all in bulky androgynous clothing.

  He found them in the park, Vincent claimed. And they had offered their allegiance and services.

  What that could possibly mean, Stephen could only wonder. They walked with him a while—the man in lamé was about his age, talkative and wide-ranging in his subjects. But he smelled bad, as did his companions—the predictable dried-fruit smell of winos—and they sheared off as Stephen approached the gates of the complex, bound for somewhere down the fence line and vanishing into the early evening shadows.

  The gates to the back campus were open night and day, easily entered, but the Antioch complex was indeed complex, and soon Stephen lost his way among the buildings, the theatre out of sight behind the Youth Center, the Counseling Headquarters, the gym, and the food court. Stephen swore under his breath again, and wandered until he found the long, near-empty parking lot of the church. It was as though the twins just might be bringing him in to sweep up after their whim and drama. His apprehension grew as he glimpsed Dolores Starr’s old Charade straddling two parking spaces and recalled vaguely that she had known Koenig some time back.

  It was 8 pm, after all, and apparently one of the few weeknights when Antioch offered no evening service. At the door’s resistance to his pull, Stephen snorted, then caught himself with the understanding that a place had the right to be locked now and then. Most of the cars were clustered around a rather large building beside and behind the church, so he headed there.

  The sound of raised voices and bogus accents reached him. He could tell a high-school cast, even when he barely overheard them. Stephen followed the intonations, and a last door opened into a lobby, a climate-controlled theatre with cushioned and tiered seating, expensive and subtle lighting, and an enviable sound system. For a moment he settled into the back row, considerably behind four young men whose hair was quasi-long and stylishly sculptured, all of whom whispered idly and pretended to watch Our Town, which, as best Stephen remembered, was ending its second act up on the stage.

  As the Stage Manager and Mrs. Soames exchanged their platitudes of uncertainty and praise about the institution of marriage, Dolores Starr moved surprisingly into the seat beside Stephen. She laughed softly at his expression, whispered that she had brought Aron here to rescue Jack Rausch, stared down one of the young men who had turned around to shush her, then gracefully fielded the solicitous may we help you? from another.

  Stephen grinned, linked his fingers behind his head, and leaned back in the astonishingly comfortable seat. He enjoyed the luxury of it all, and as the lights went up between the acts and the hands set a dozen or so chairs in a row to limn the cemetery, Stephen caught himself remembering, after a long intermission, some of the things he had liked about Dolores Starr.

  “No, I have no idea,” she replied to Stephen’s questions about where his actors had gone. “I do know there’s a plan to spring Jack Rausch free from this Baptist Thornton Wildlife preserve. It’s almost good theatre, if you think about it. Here we are, hanging on the third act, witness to a play where we know the ending, but…”

  “But that play is not the real play tonight, is it?” Stephen asked, squinting toward the bare stage for unexpected movement in the wings.

  “Don’t interrupt, Stephen. Even if you’re right. Because it isn’t the real play, we know that, but we aren’t sure wha
t’s around and behind it. We can guess where things might end up and hope for something more interesting than we expected, even though we are usually disappointed.”

  Stephen turned to her. “Sorry.”

  “Oh, Stephen. You didn’t actually think I meant you by that, did you?”

  “No. Sorry for interrupting.” His gaze turned back to the stage, and he masked a faint smile, convinced he had called her out. Such little dramas were as entertaining as anything Antioch might produce. No doubt he would have waited for the next thing with amusement and pleasant suspense had not Dolores dropped the news.

  George Castille, it seemed, was on the premises.

  37 Episode: Leaving Our Town

  Enter the first of the dead, taking their places behind the chairs on stage, muttering, exchanging jokes, two of the departed in amiable teenaged roughhouse. Awaiting the beginning of the scene, when they would spring into borrowed life, exaggerated gestures and approximated British accents. Some would be disguised as the elderly when their time came, but these were early rehearsals—no costume, no makeup, no dramatic bend-over—so it was impossible to tell some of the principals—Mrs. Gibbs, Mrs. Soames—from the anonymous cloud of witnesses surrounding them.

  Stephen leaned back in the unfairly comfortable chairs. “Never seen so many teenagers side by side in a graveyard,” he whispered. “Was there one of those high-school rampage killings at Grover’s Corners?”

  Dolores stifled a cry, slapped his shoulder playfully. “You are still the worst, Stephen!”

  He smiled, then burst out laughing as she leaned toward him and whispered.

  “Yep, Grover’s Corners is changin’. Them new-fangled metal detectors. Them assault rifles.”

  One of the ardent youth ministers shushed them, until Dolores stared him down again.

  She swore she had no idea what Aron was planning, and seemed troubled when Stephen told her about Vincent and his new entourage of vagrants. As the Stage Manager set the scene, pointing out all the vistas from the imaginary hilltop cemetery, one of the ministers slipped out, smiling and nodding nervously at Stephen and Dolores as he scurried up the aisle.

  The Stage Manager was dispensing folksy wisdom. How we all knew that something was eternal. Was way down deep in every human being.

  “I expect we’ll be evicted soon,” Dolores predicted. “That friendly nod wasn’t friendly. Hope whatever Aron’s planning is underway by now.”

  Stephen shrugged. “Maybe he’s gone to get Koenig. As I recall, you were a favorite back in the day.”

  Dolores stiffened, and for a moment he thought she had taken offense again. Then he followed her gaze to the stage.

  Where the four strange vagrants he had seen earlier—mulleted, afro-picked, and stretched in lamé—had settled among the back row of chairs, intoning the almost choral observations of the dead.

  About the funeral, they spoke. About Emily Webb Gibbs, the heroine, who had just died in childbirth.

  And then Maia De Chevre joined their number as the Emily in question.

  She began all that long exchange with “Mother Gibbs” about how the living had no idea, how the world she was leaving was so beautiful, and Stephen leaned forward, gaping, wondering aloud to Dolores why nobody had told him Maia was in this play.

  He caught a whiff of something stronger than wine. The astringent tug of juniper.

  How much these days?

  “Oh, she isn’t, Stephen,” Dolores replied. “The De Chevres are Catholic. They’d smile at her here, but hardly cast her. Maia made fun of the play when we did it at the high school, but she made a passable Emily, I thought.”

  “And she’s passing again,” Stephen observed.

  Together they watched the third act flow toward those moments when Emily’s ghost leaves the cemetery and descends through terrain and time to the Grover’s Corners of her twelfth birthday years before, into a poignant brightness and intensity in which every lived moment gathers weight by associations, by perspective and loss. And even though both of them loathed the play, again they were caught by its ability to press each convergence of nerve and vessel.

  “Damn it if it doesn’t still get to me, Dolores,” Stephen whispered, and she murmured assent. And there they would have sat until the Stage Manager told them to go home, had it not been for Mrs. Webb’s bustling, excessive entrance—the mother poor insubstantial Emily had returned to visit in vain.

  For the mother was George Castille in apron and bouffant wig, gesturing in his most persuasive impersonation of Jessica Tandy. He and Maia played the scene off one another with a kind of mother-daughter chemistry, Maia with a strange, subdued passion that brought forth a fatherly instinct in Stephen Thorne that he thought did not exist, while George wed an exaggerated maternal instinct to skewed sense of comedy, like Medea played by a drag queen. The other two ministers had risen and left with a rush, the clamor of their voices fading through the lobby. They within minutes, as the play moved toward the last contrivance, when Emily’s husband, George Gibbs—played by Vincent De Chevre—rushed onto the stage and fell grieving onto the grave.

  They had done it, Stephen marveled: his little cast had hijacked the staple of American theatre and done so impressively. He marveled as well at the skill with which they’d done it, translating the reflexes of the play into something reflective, recognizing the poetry in all of its mawkishness and making it blossom in wearied ground.

  But he was damned if he knew why they had done it.

  “That’s Peter in the hall,” Dolores whispered nervously, but Stephen laid a hand reassuringly on her shoulder, allowing with a smirk and bravado that whatever the charges—from criminal trespass to kidnapping—he would bear them for all.

  Nor did his courage fail him when they emerged into the lobby to the angry glare of Antioch’s entire youth ministry staff, while behind them, taller by a head than the loftiest assistant pastor, Peter Koenig regarded them with puzzlement, exasperation, and a hint of amusement.

  Over his shoulder, barely visible in the descending dusk, you could see Aron Starr hustling the Rausch boy into Dolores’ Charade, Jack casting one last look toward the theatre as the tinted windows on the auto’s passenger side closed to obscure whatever thought or movement would pass between the boys on the way to their destination.

  They were like athletes, their contest either over or ready to begin.

  As Peter and Stephen turned to face each other in complete incomprehension.

  38 Episode: Where are You Staying?

  But no more so than the incomprehension of Aron Starr, driving his mother’s old Charade north up the interstate and regarding the mystery in the passenger’s seat beside him.

  Jack had come willingly, as though being yanked from the stage in mid-rehearsal was a matter of course. Now he rode where Aron took him, passive but alert, watching the reflection of streetlights as it rushed across the windshield of the speeding car.

  “Dude,” Aron began, and Jack smiled, leaning forward a little in the seat. “Dude, there’s something we haven’t planned for in this.”

  Jack laughed softly. “Oh, really! Which is…?”

  “So, where are you going to stay, Jack? I can take you across the bridge to Jeffersonville. Where is it that your family lives over there?”

  “Oh, I don’t believe I should go back there, Aron,” Jack replied, leaving the options hanging.

  “So. Then…I been thinking, Jack. Maybe you oughta stay at Mr. Thorne’s or Mr. Castille’s. You’d probably prefer Mr. Castille’s, I’m guessing?”

  To which Jack, “I bet neither of them knows you’re planning their house guests. They’d both probably freak at the prospect, so no, that’s out of the question.”

  “Are you having second thoughts, Jack?”

  “Just saying that neither Mr. Thorne nor Mr. Castille would be expecting me. And why would I ‘prefer Mr. Castille?’”

  Aron paused, glared uncomfortably out at the road. “I was just thinking, I suppose.”
r />   “‘Thinking?’ ‘Supposed?’”

  “You, kinda struck me as being more comfortable at Mr. Castille’s. Your hair. And…you and Vinnie. Right?”

  Jack yawned and stretched slowly in the cramped car seat. “As you said, I’m just springing free of Antioch for a while. Thanks for getting me out of there. School’s out, so I don’t have to go back there. And only my grandmother will notice I’m missing at home. I can stay around here. In the city. Help on your play instead of Our Town. You need music for The Bacchae, I think?”

  They drove on in what Aron took to be perplexed silence. Jack produced an iPod, started to put on the earphones. Aron took them swiftly past the airport and the UPS terminal, his thoughts scrambling as he considered what to do with the passenger, if only where to lodge him for the night.

  “So, Jack? What’s Antioch like?”

  Jack took out one of the phones and regarded his driver. “A church, bro. Just your regular church, except it’s enormous. Pretty respectable, everyone up to good clean fun, which they don’t really see is too clean to be fun. Koenig’s pretty cool. The assistant ministers are mostly dicks, but that’s the way it is most anywhere, right? The little guys jockey for power, and the big guy’s got nothing to prove. Maybe they’re dicks so Reverend Koenig doesn’t have to be…”

  The car slowed in more congested traffic by the old Fairgrounds. Up ahead you could see the blue flashing lights of a police cruiser, sorting out a minor collision that had strung out the traffic for a couple of miles. Aron decided to take the exit near his home, to go surface roads and drop Jack off where Jack needed dropping off, in someone else’s home and away from this slow, channeled movement of traffic. He knew his mother would have preferred a more conventional way of getting Jack away from Antioch, but their plan had seemed so awesome at the time, so filled with meta-possibility. He thought Dolores would come around, would actually begin to think it was kinda cool, this bold abduction. The De Chevres, after all, thought she was amazing, thought she was the mom everyone wanted to have. He had seen her standing with Mr. Thorne and Reverend Koenig as he and Jack had broke for the car.