Moscow in the truck ahead took a wide cut into oncoming traffic and disappeared between a mismatched pair of buildings. Lon cursed him under his breath. Instead of following he turned in to the curb, coasting along for several yards before the truck coughed, shuddered and came to rest just under a long, low marquee. Facing the street, square in the afternoon sun, it said in black letters:

above a plain grey front broken by three doors set back a few feet from the sidewalk. They were flanked by a pair of display panels filled with sepia-colored photos. The glass was cracked in two places; it had been taped over at some point, but the tape itself had yellowed and cracked, and hung peeling like dead skin from the dirty panes.

The four of us climbed down to the sidewalk looking every bit as tired and dirty as the truck, which stood making little disgusted sounds at us, overheated sighs and clicks, for having pushed it so hard. Mary came toting her case around from the other side and disappeared into the shade under the marquee; she stood with her back pressed against brick, puffing her cheeks as if to blow the heat away. Lon followed, searching through his ring of keys. It was Jones who caught me looking at the faces in the display glass.

They were people that I'd never seen before, as strange and almost as awkwardly antique as Mrs. Templeton and her mentors had been in the photographs she'd shown me: a dignified gentleman in a harsh collar and top hat, a bosomy woman with mascara running down her cheeks, a feral creature clothed all in dirty leaves, and a dozen more of all types, though some of them must have been the same actors pictured in wildly different parts.

"Who are they?" I said when I noticed her face reflected in the glass beside my own.

"Gargoyles," Jones said. "Set out to watch over the place." She named them to me, raising her hand to each. "Cameron Watson MacTeagle. Evelyn King. Frances Garnett. Nelson Omaha. Sissy Hartley she was almost as bad as Sylvie."

Lon coughed beside the door. "MacTeagle again," Jones said, pointing out a donkey-headed man, "as Bottom. That was his moment; I've never seen anyone to equal him in the part. But Mac was a mule I couldn't control."

Lon went ahead and unlocked the doors, pushing them as far back as he could against the chain looped through their handles, half an inch of black space and nothing but silence and pent-up air and a sense of dust beyond. He coughed again; Jones said "All right, I've got it," and bent to open the padlock with an iron key that she fished out of her dungarees. A wave of heat spilled out across the threshold. "There you are," Jones said, motioning into the gloom

I stepped into a dusky room draped in sheets of faded midnight colors, billowing half-moon shapes that hung overhead like the inside of a gypsy tent. Tassels dangled at the ends of brown cord, swaying gently now as the stale air was pressed back from the street. A canvas broadside faced the doorway, so large that it had the effect of a picture window, except that the view painted into it was anything but natural, the Queen of Fairies cradling Bottom in her lap, stroking his long ears under a starry sky. Others like it covered the walls of the room: now in a slash of sunlight, now in cobwebbed shadow, I saw a circusful of powerfully exotic figures, magicians and monster men, hags and air spirits, amazons and ogres, automatons, gods, cat-women, and even a wolf baring his fangs. They posed for me out of the steaming dark, stirring against new, fresh air. They dared me to come inside.

I wasn't sure that they were Mary's work until I saw her stop there in the middle of the lobby, turning to each as if greeting old friends. There was very little echo for such a still place; she stepped forward with hardly a sound, drew an old handkerchief out of her sleeve, and began to brush the dust from their faces. Watching her, I caught Jones watching me, standing with the light at her back, making no effort whatever to hide her amusement.

Beyond the second doorway, which opened in the wall just next to Bottom's donkey head, I could not help but compare Jones's Valenciennes with the Majestic back home in Saint Paul. It was so small that a center aisle would have robbed the place of its best seats, and so the rows were all grouped in the middle of the house, bordered by two uncarpeted pathways sloping down to the foot of a little stage not more than eighteen feet wide. Its bare, blue-painted walls were shot through with cracks. One of the ceiling panels had a hole in it big enough to accommodate Lon's head. Dust was everywhere; Lon had already gone halfway down the aisle, peeling filthy dropcloths back from the seats, and sneezing at what they kicked into the air.

Jones and I were starting down after him when a murmur and a shuffling climbed out of the empty space behind the stage. It was Moscow, Sylvie and the Templetons coming through from the back with relieved expressions on their faces and a suitcase or two that they carried like props.

"Here," Templeton shouted at me from the floor. "What do you think of our ancestral home?"

I did not want to answer. We had played to bigger houses in towns a fraction of the size; but to have said that would have made me sound like a prima donna, even to myself. I called back, "Not what I expected"

"What did you expect?" Jones said. She reached out and gave one of the dropcloths a good hard whack, and then to a great burst of laughter from the stage pressed her palm to my face, leaving a print of dust that I could feel like itching powder from my forehead down to my chin. "This is every playhouse that has ever been!" she said. "This is The Dionysus and The Florentine Church. This is The Globe, The Dorset Garden, Haymarket, The Vaudeville and The Théâtre des Arts! This is every dirt arena, every amphitheater, town square, and courtyard that's ever been home to a masque! Here. Here, try it on."

Jones stepped into the nearest uncovered row, drawing me by the arm after her. We flopped into the center seats. Jones got out her silver-capped pen and held it between her fingers, covering the bottom of her face. "We are Serlio," she said very softly, her lips almost touching my cheek. "We are La Cecca, we are Vitruvius. And all the rest. Builders of the theater. Look down there."

Two rows ahead, Lon folded a dropcloth into a neat square, squinted at us, sniffed, and turned away. He went on down the aisle, lifting sheets from the chairs below. "I think he wants some help," I said.

"Don't you see it?"

I looked again. Moscow and the Templetons had disappeared into the back. They'd left their suitcases parked in a corner by the proscenium. "Nnnn-no, I don't see anything. Except--"

"Not the baggage. Look there."

"What?"

"That shade. A whirl of silk. That's Miss Bernhardt down there. Doomed to spend an eternity learning how to act. Listen."

"What's she saying?"

Jones traced the movement of her ghost actress with a sweeping motion of her right hand. "She's reciting from Hero and Leander. 'When bees make wax, Nature doth not intend it should be made a torch. But we know the proper virtue of it, make it so, and when 'tis made we light it.'"

"You've got good ears."

"Shh. You're not paying attention." She reached across and with her left hand covered my eyes. "What do you hear?"

The rustle of heavy cloth; soft, muffled footsteps all around; a wind from somewhere.

"What are ghosts," Jones said, "but memories of passion? And what does an actor do but invoke the passions? Think of all the spirits that must be working here! All the faceless actors who've played out the great comedy"

Her hand fell away from my eyes. Lon had gone off somewhere; we were alone in the house. "'Now, Dido,'" she was saying. "'With these relics burn thyself, and make Aeneas famous through the world for perjury and slaughter of a queen. And from mine ashes let a conqueror rise, that may revenge this treason to a queen by ploughing up his countries with the sword!'"

Nothing in the little playhouse had changed; but Jones was so intent on the stage that I couldn't help but listen and try to see. "'I have told thee often,'" she said in a voice like ground glass, "'and I re-tell thee again and again, I hate the Moor. My cause is hearted; thine hath no less reason. Let us be conjunctive in our revenge against him.'"

What was happening down there? The edges of the stage seemed to be darkening, the light somehow contracting, gathering itself around a central point. Perhaps there was a faint motion in the grey space at the back of the stage, a distant stirring

With a slash of her pen against the air she dismissed one figure, and raised another. "'Corrupt my little children -- poison my home? That's not true! It could never, never be true!'"

"Who was that?" I said. "You never said it like that"

Jones leaned over so that her cheek touched mine. She pointed down to a spot at the very lip of the stage. "'Sweet Helen, make me Immortal with a kiss--'" she said. "Now. There. Look: 'Her lips suck forth my soul: see, where it flies! -- Come, Helen, come, give me my soul again.'"

"All right," I said. "Point taken. Cut it out."

"Shh. Listen, he's playing: 'When thou cam'st first, thou strok'st me and made much of me, woulds't give me water with berries in it, and teach me how to name the bigger light, and how the less, that burn by day and night; and then I loved thee and showed thee all the qualities o' th' isle, the fresh springs, brine pits, barren place and fertile. Curs'd be that I did so! All the charms of Sycorax, toads, beetles, bats light on you! For I am all the subjects that you have, which first was mine own king; and here you sty me in this hard rock, whiles you keep from me the rest of the island.'"

Jones molded the air. "Listen: 'And poor Leander, poorest where the fire of credulous love made him most rich surmis'd: As short was he of that himself so priz'd, as is an empty gallant full of form, that thinks each look an act, each drop a storm.'"

"Jones"

"'Have I any other joy in this world but smoothing the way for you, my dear boy? You who've had neither father nor mother to turn to. And now, we've reached our goal, my dear!'"

I felt the dusty imprint of her hand again on my face. Not more than eight rows away, the stage held itself in silence and dusk. Its words came through her out of a far-distant past.

"'Then for you -- your heart, your mind, your soul --it's the Sphinx or nothing.'"

Jones sat forward in her chair, her hands raised as if in prayer, her eyes fixed on the long-dead actors that I knew she could see clearly down below. An awful roar came out of her; she leapt to her feet, crying "Bravo! Whoooo! Bravo!" leaving me no choice but to rise at her side and join in:

our applause climbing so hard and fast that it echoed all around and came rolling back over us from behind, as though she had been playing to a full house all along, an audience of specters

"Somebody call me?" Templeton said, poking his head out from the wings.

"Just testing," Jones said. She shoved her hands into her pockets, turned and caught me there still in the attitude of ovation. "Now wipe your face," she said, putting on her best cat-smile. "You look silly."