Under the marquee the footprints of passersby blurred into a broad trail of wetness running from puddle to puddle across the bare concrete. There beyond, in an alcove lined with yellowing posters from the season before, some small bits of rubbish and crumpled newspaper had gathered at the foot of rustcolored doors. It was a minute or two of searching through my pockets before I could find the key; as I fitted it into the lock, a hulking grey truck with a grey canvas tied over its back end came lumbering across the frosted glass, throwing motor noise against the building. Waterstreaked faces peered out at my back; the truck gave a mechanical whine, slowed, then rolled on and turned at the end of the block.

It was cool inside the lobby, and perfectly still but for my own shufflings echoed back to me from the emerald walls. I came in and stood dripping on the tile, still catching my breath from the run across town, waiting now for the players to come. Out beyond the marquee cars splashed up waves in the growing sunlight. Moments later, another truck just like the first drove by, blinking its taillights. That will be them, I thought. Wake up.

Beyond a low archway the building opened out into a twilit cavern, thick with the smell that grows on old places when they have been closed up for a week, or a season, or more. I went past fading murals of willowtrees in their frames of painted tile, past the rows of leather-clad seats. Empty during all of the long winters, they held a hundred and fifty whispering townies nearly every night from June through August, when the touring companies came around and the playhouse breathed in sweltering air from under the moon. Now Mr. DeLodges was talking about refurbishing the place, turning it into a movie house that could be open year 'round. I didn't like the idea; I worried about what the building would lose. "It will chase away the ghosts," I said, trying to make a joke out of it even though I knew Mr. DeLodges was himself a firm believer in the supernatural. "Perhaps," he would say, giving me his best sly smile from across the desk. "But at least then the building itself will survive, hmm?"

The first of the trucks had already parked by the time I came into the back. It was standing with its nose almost touching the building and a cluster of strangers posed alongside, two men and two women who seemed to have nothing in common other than distance traveled, mileage accumulated along steaming, endless roads. Three of them were standing out under an awful old batwing of an umbrella; a couple in their fifties, obviously married though they were shaped differently, as graceful in their manner as royalty fallen on hard times, and a man with the look of a mechanic about him, lots of pale flesh piled onto a frame slightly smaller than the truck's and an expression on his face as if he didn't like his cigarette but was going to keep on smoking it anyway. The fourth was a girl no older than myself, perched on the running board in the shelter of the others. Blonde curls bordered the edge of her face; she was dressed in what looked like a parody of Victorian mourning, black blouse, black embroidered vest, a lacy black skirt with a hint of slip showing at the hem, and high-button shoes.

They looked up as I fumbled with the lock. One by one they each took up a dented suitcase or a basket or a rose-colored bundle and came in under the dripping overhang. They waited patiently, but the stage door was so badly swollen that I could not get it to open, and at last the big man came through from behind, put his palm above the handle and shoved with such force that I nearly lost my balance. Then the sound of their laughter and the sound of rain pushed away the dead calm. With their arms full of color the company brushed past me in single file, a damp, tatty little parade, smiling politely, whispering their hellos.

"Would you be the manager?" I said as the big man entered. He was carrying a trunk that might comfortably have held the girl, but he paused in mid-step, squinted at me and nodded back towards the alley. Around the cigarette, his lips were set in the faint beginnings of a grin. "You want Jones," he said. "Back there."

Their second truck had just pulled in from the alley beyond. Steam curled off of its hood, all four doors stood open above the wet gravel. Two troupers in raincoats and hats were already working at the old rope holding the canvas fast. I was about to call to the nearest of them, "Mr. Jones?" when I saw a booted foot coming down from the passenger side. "You were right," a woman's voice said behind the windowglare. "It's clearing now."

She came around the front of the truck, not looking where she was going and apparently not needing to, lean and tall in a man's jacket and silver-grey slacks, a tie knotted loosely through the collar of a dark blue workshirt. Her hair was not quite black. She had a striking manner of unrestrained calm that I had never seen before, and a face that wouldn't blur no matter how poorly you focused on her. One hand was cupped over her brow. Her gaze followed along the building as far and as high as it went. She didn't notice me until she had come halfway across the yard.

"Miss Jones?" I said.

A silent laugh rose up in her eyes, and was caught before it could go any farther. "Forget the Miss," she said, offering her hand. "It's just Jones. You look like something out of Horatio Alger."

"Mr. DeLodges doesn't get around much," I said. "I'm his, his agent. Winston Howe. I've got some papers for you to sign."

Jones only smiled. The rain had almost stopped; high up on the truck, the canvas cover had come away, its underside flaked with the remains of a painted scene, a still-blue sky dotted with battered cotton shapes. "Lead on," she said.

The largest room I had to offer them was a place wedged in close beside the stage. Its walls were of cream-colored tile, well lit from a slanted tier of windows. A row of tables held up a parallel row of empty mirrors. It already seemed crowded; in the constant motion of the company ironing boards, clothes racks and other more unfamiliar things were appearing, boxed all around by an infinity of trunks. My briefcase was hiding in the corner where I had left it; Jones and I found a quiet spot at the end of the tables, and I opened it against a backdrop of black glass.

Inside was my usual mess of hand-and-typewritten pages, none of which hand anything to do with business. They were stuffed all anyhow into the pockets, spilling over into the main compartment. The contracts should have been on top, but were not; Jones waited with her elbows on the chair back and her chin resting in the palm of her hand while I rifled through the stack. "Kind of a swamp," I said.

"So I see. Do you mind?"

Without waiting for an answer she reached in, lifted out a paperclipped wad of sheets and held them under the windowlight. She studied them without a trace of surprise or even interest, her eyes dark and perfectly steady, almost unmoving. "What's this?" she said.

"Nothing important. Mr. DeLodges lets me use his typewriter after hours. Here, here they are." Red-faced, in a panic lest she think I'd planned it this way, and wondering if perhaps I had, I shoved the contracts under her nose.

Jones set the other pages aside, drew a beautiful silver-capped fountain pen from her jacket pocket. "Where do I sign?"

"There. There. And there. Um, I'd read them first."

"I trust you."

"That's as may be, but Mr. DeLodges"

"Is a man of honor, I assume." She bent and signed three times:

Then with the pen still scratching and her face still turned down to the paper, her voice as vast and as quiet as the empty theater beyond, she said, "I knew what inspiration meant"

A cool breeze blew in from the yard. It came from behind her, pushing the scent of the open road into my face. Jones capped her pen, straightened, and looked me in the eye. "I knew the charm and magic of quiet nights," she said, "when you sit at your desk from dusk to dawn and indulge in flights of fancy."

I said, "I beg your pardon?"

One corner of her mouth turned itself up, so faintly that I wondered if I was imagining it. "It's Chekov. Slightly altered. You reminded me of it. You and your boss's typewriter. These." And at that she took back the story of mine that she had discarded a moment before. She folded it lengthwise, tucked it together with the pen back into her breast pocket, then closed and latched my briefcase, nodded toward the stage. "Go on out," she said. "I'll get some order here and then you can give us a guided tour, all right?"

I said all right. Then I laughed (there was nothing else I could do), and I turned and walked. On my way out I passed the little blonde in her Victorian black, carrying what looked like a basket of laundry. She had pulled off her shoes and stockings; dust curled around from the soles of her feet, a wavering line of footprints followed her across the tile. "Get your business done?" she said as she went by. And she gave a funny smile, a sideways look, a look that said she knew it all.

That night I took my parents to see the Jones Company give their first performance in our town. We arrived at the theater five minutes before the curtain, after a long uncomfortable ride with the three of us crushed in the back seat of a yellow cab. My father would not allow me to pay the fare; once inside the lobby, he rushed past me straight to the ticket booth, though I had told him more than once that they were to be my guests. "The name is Howe," he said with his face almost touching the glass. "Mr. and Mrs. Carroll Howe." But the girl beyond had already spotted me, had already pushed the tickets through in a dusty red envelope marked PAID below my name. By the time he turned away from the window, the lobby lights had begun to flicker. "I'll pay you back," he said. Without taking another step, he opened his coat, and vanished his hand inside.

Faraway, in the shadow of the darkening theater, someone began to raise a graceful, beckoning series of notes from the strings of a dulcimer. "Forget it," I said. "Please. Let's just go in." But he paused still with his fingers touching the wallet, the ticket envelope still unopened against his lapel, until my mother pretended to notice the music for the first time. "Listen," she said. "They've started." So at last he gave in. The usher took our tickets, ripped them in half envelope and all, and waved us through. As we passed under the archway, a black swirl of draperies closed at our backs.

Down there before the stage, a cracked canvas was dangling in a haze of orangecolored light. Its left half was dominated by a skeleton, ten feet tall and shrouded in rags, facing a half-naked woman on the right. She had the moon at her back and willow leaves for hair. The two giant figures were lifting the corners of a starry curtain to expose a scene beyond like something out of a picture book. In it, a cast of painted actors performed Romeo and Juliet to a small painted audience made up of kings and queens; behind them, a canvas backdrop hung from the rafters featuring Earth and Death parting another star-patterned curtain from across another performance, another audience, another curtain, an endless infinity of Giants, actors, kings, from where the music of the dulcimer at first seemed to come.

There were no more then twenty people in the house. We settled into the middle of the third row, into seats that were so thickly upholstered that we sank slowly all through the show. "Why are there so many titles?" my mother said. She had opened the program in her gloved hands, a single parchment-like sheet of paper folded into eight different sections, one for each performance of the week. "Here," I said in a whisper. 'This is tonight's."

It was to be The Lady From The Sea, followed by an intermission with music, then a "panorama" called The Twilight of The Gods. "How long does this thing go on?" my father said as the last of the overhead light dropped away. "Do they plan on keeping us here until the crack of dawn?"

In the stillness that followed I caught a hint of kerosene fumes drifting from behind the stage. For one moment it seemed as if the skeleton and the goddess had actually begun to draw the curtain apart, until they were themselves gathered into folds of colored cloth. They opened onto a stereoptican vista that shot back and back beyond the walls of the theater. A globe of sun climbed out of the distant sea, rising in a lazy dreamlike arc, so real that it drew applause.

Ten minutes passed before the dulcimer spoke again, to mark the entrance of The Lady from The Sea. I was sitting so close to the stage that I could hear her breathe. Her hair was wet. It was Jones.

Then I thought I could hear my father whispering something in the dark at my side. Hsst, I thought he said. Listen time. But when I turned, his face was as expressionless as if he had covered it with a blanket. He did not notice me, or pretended not to. Thick squares of light had fallen across the surface of his glasses; I could see the play reflected there, a double image of luminous figures in motion before his eyes.

It was a strange, alchemic sort of drama, about a woman with a choice to make and the older man she has married, who grants her the freedom to make it. T had never seen an Ibsen play before, and so had no idea what to expect, how much of the mysticism came from the author and how much from Jones's distant presence. As Ellida Wangel she carried herself with a distracted sort of grace, her voice thinner than it had been in the afternoon, though still clear, with an evocative edge that caught at her words and carried meaning into the rafters, the dusty corners, the bones of the theater. Alone in the garden, she was haunted by a stranger from the past, a man with a dark face like a wedge lurking in the shadow behind the gate. It was a dreadful choice that he offered her, a choice that could turn the past into the future, and myth into reality

When it ended I could hardly believe that they had enough left in them to give us more. But the house lights lifted only halfway. In the ten minutes that they allowed us, I went through the playbill section by section while from the stage above a woman played to the hall on an instrument that she held in her hands. There were only seven names, appearing again and again, oftentimes within the same show; I could not even match them with the faces of the actors, though I had met them all earlier, in the light of day.

The "panorama" turned out to be a tragedy without dialogue, in which the pagan Gods, some Greek, some Norse, and some more ancient to whom I could not give names, all met at the Gates of Death. Faced with their own extinction brought about by the refusal of modern man simply to believe in their existence, the Gods descended one last time into the world of the mortals, to make themselves known once again, to plead their case before cab drivers and construction workers, doctors and university students, only to be exorcised, or dissected, or ignored, anything but believed, as one by one the golden threads of their lives are snipped by the remorseless Norns. The performances were as broad and as passionate as anything I had ever seen, led by the man I had mistaken for an elder statesman, Wangel from Ibsen's Lady, who played Wotan. The Jones woman, Margaret Darwin, played four parts: Artemis, Hela, Persephone, and Verdande, who cut the thread of the Allfather's life. Together with the others of her company, her pantheon, she moved in a fanciful world that must have been all wires and clockwork behind the grandeur: demons appeared and circled in the clouds; the heavens opened and delivered the Gods to the mortal plane; images of the Great Myths paraded across the skies, and the floorboards of the theater itself rumbled with the passing of the ancients.

By then I had forgotten all about my parents, my concern for whether or not the show was understandable to them, or even tolerable. I was the only one standing when the canvas of Earth and Death closed upon the body of Wotan; as the players filed out from under Death's raised arm I felt my mother's fingers closing at the hem of my jacket, trying to pull me back down into the chair. She succeeded once, only to have me rise again. Did the Jones woman notice? She bowed from the edge of the stage, her face spattered with paint just like a crazy Indian, her hair all wild, her eyes like dark glass never turning down. She looked straight past me, into the back.

"Well," my mother said when the house lights came up. She drew her wrap close around her shoulders, latched it, then lifted her hat from the empty seat at her side. It had birds wired into an arrangement of cloth flowers above the band; they wobbled and fluttered as she set them back up on her head. She said nothing more. We waited in our seats, my father craning his head to see if the departing audience had thinned out enough to please him. We were just about to leave when a little blonde head appeared around the edge of the curtain, and said, "Winston!"

It was not her calling to me but the way she used my first name that made my parents look around. The girl grinned at us, thrust her hand through and waved, then motioned for us to come up out of the aisle. "Winston!" she said again. "Come on! Jones wants to see you!"

There in back, in the warren of musty, propfilled rooms and cramped hallways, my parents waited like frightened tourists in the bowels of a South American police station. They would not take off their hats, they did not intend to relax; we stood in a corner outside the green room looking earnest and polite as the players came and went with pieces of the scenery in their costumed arms. When Jones came out at last she was wearing an apricot robe, perspiring some under the remains of her facepaint. She towered over my parents, shook their hands, asked if they had been comfortable during the length of the show.

"Oh yes," my mother said. "It was very nice. Very colorful."

Jones gave her that same indulgent twisting of her mouth, that same smirk she had used on me earlier in the day. "Well it's not Sabbattini," she said. "At least not entirely." Then she turned her face to mine. "I read that tall tale of yours. I liked it."

"Thank you," I said. "Which one was it?"

"You haven't decided yet. Either 'The House of Marvels' or 'Whisperings'. I like the second title best, it has mystery. The other is just descriptive."

I said I would keep that in mind, then, foolishly, asked if she had the manuscript close at hand. "It was my only copy. I never thought I would need another, so I never made one."

If I had stepped outside of the scene as planned, Jones gave no sign of it. "I'll tell you what," she said, quite convincingly, as if the thought had just come to her. "Why don't you come by tomorrow morning? I'll have it for you then. You can stay and watch the rehearsal. I have some people here who are quite good with dialogue; we'll see if we can learn you a trick or two, hmm?"

I could feel my parents watching me. Nothing but a simple "no thank you" would have suited them, but I could not bring myself to say it, any more than I could bring myself to say yes in front of them. It would be a Saturday -- I did not even have Mr. DeLodges to use as an excuse. Jones was waiting. In the end I blamed the rails. "Well, the trains are always late on the weekend I doubt that I could get here on time."

"Perfect," Jones said. For the first time her manner seemed genuinely friendly. "We don't get started until late, except when we're driving. I'll see you then, around ten-thirty?"

She took my hand and was gone before I could reply. My parents and I were left standing alone in the wings, in the steady flow of busy, whispering actors. No one took any further notice of us.

We went out through the front into the quiet city, walked along with our shapes lengthening and falling away from under us until I could hail a cab. Something on my mother's wrist jingled as we climbed inside; in the blue light from the street I could just see the shadow of a robin's felt wing as it dipped above her left shoulder. She sat without speaking, but with the intention of speaking bubbling up more and more as the car rolled along a mile or two under the moon. Then, with her face downturned, her voice as cool and as inevitable as she could make it, she whispered, "How do you know her?"

I was still awake, unable to reconcile my House of Marvels with the marvels I had seen, the motions she had made, when the four-thirty train passed by on its way to Minneapolis. Its cry came to me from across the night. When I was a child the train whistle had never wakened me, but once when I was twelve I heard it and conjured a vision in my mind of a ghostly woman dressed all in spiderwebs, wailing from the edge of town, not at the world or for an unborn baby, but as a calling-on song, for me. Seeing her so far off, wondering what was really out there, I turned in my bed to look out through the window. It was a bright night, the edges of the yard standing out as if in the glow of a faraway light, gelled blue. Across the drive I followed the undergrowth in the direction of the railroad, as far as my eyes could see before my breath clouded up the glass.

I was nine years older now, remembering her for the first time in half a decade, lying there in the same bed with a tightness in me that I had never felt before. "Hold your breath," I said aloud. "Hold your breath, and it will go away."