Every morning Mary came on foot all the way from the grey, chimneysmoked neighborhood where she lived alone with a stray tomcat called Max. She was never later than six-thirty, even on stormy days; she was always in a cheerful mood. She would come stomping in through the stage door with the same chilled, good-morning smile and pause to shake the snow out of her hat and mittens. Then she'd head straight for the coffeepot, to spend a few minutes planning her day with Jones or Lon or both. "Aren't you awake yet?" she would say to me, shivering with the mug in her longfingered hands, the steam rising up into her face. "No, dammit," I'd say. And she would squeeze my arm, returning to her conversation with the same relaxed, obscene alertness, to ask about the proper size of a window, the right color for a cloud.

Mary spent her mornings kneeling over muslin backcloths, which, when spread out to their full length, looked to me like windows in the stage floor opening down into Athens or the Black Forest. She crawled over them with pads strapped to her knees and feet, a kerchief tied across her brow, a tin tray filled with a dozen or more paintjars, a rainbowcolored rag and a camelhair brush that she held far down the handle like a pencil, re-painting the spots where a leaf or a cobblestone or a bit of tromp l'oeil masonry had flecked off or cracked. She always worked from left to right, top to bottom, covering the whole length of a scene in an hour or two. From time to time the damage might be greater than usual, might lead her astray across the face of the canvas; that was when she might whisper to herself, so softly that you would have to be with her on the scene just to hear it:

with her once-white gloves brushing away the dust and her face downturned, following the crack, as she mended the summer's wear.

Around noontime, Mary could sometimes be found sitting alone in the back row of the house. Who knew what she was dreaming? She kept a black book, nothing more than a leather cover stuffed so full of sketches that she had to keep it bound with rubber bands. There in her favorite chair, where the only light came from the stage down below, she would open the book and unfold the pages one at a time into her lap. "She'll be working on the designs for the new show," Jones would say. "Go on up. She'll want to ask you about some things"

By the time I reached her, she would already have the beginnings of a scene sketched out in blue pencil, the book balanced on the back of her knees, a draft script and a page of Jones's notes in the seat to her right, a raft of old drawings splayed out all anyhow and three sharp pencils held in reserve in the metal ridge of the armrest. "Well hello," she would say as I settled into the row in front of her. I would hear the pencil scratching in the dark. "Sit down and tell me more about this"

When Mary was needed in rehearsal she would carry the black book up close against her breast, even if it was late in the process and she had to be in costume. Sometimes she wore her calm, attentive face, and sometimes the closemouthed smile. From time to time as the other actors moved around her, she might think of something and make a quick sketch, though she was not a caricaturist. "Wait," she might say, and we would all see the lightbulb over her head as she came down and handed the drawing over the footlights. "Why don't we do it this way?" When that happened the scene always played, because Mary always got the picture right.

Who could tell what she was dreaming? When Mary was not rehearsing with the group she was hiding herself out back, either to work on the new scenery or to practice on mandolin, dulcimer, guitar and piano. That was my favorite time of the day. If it was scenery, she would sometimes let me help with the flat colors. Painting flats with her was like painting in the numbers; I had my own cloth and paintspeckled cap, my own brush that didn't want to stay in my hands, and the afternoon would pass like nothing. If it was practice, then the music of the plays would come seeping through to us, torch songs and classical melodies, a half-heard snatch of an Irish jig, modern dissonance and always a bar or two of Reaching for The Moon to warm herself up. It worked especially well on the coldest, most miserable winter afternoons: dusk would already be coming down and the slush would always find its way into my boots; I would come into the little theater with fresh sandwiches for all, into light and warmth and activity and best of all the piano sounding wistfully from the back room.

When the rehearsals wound down at about four-thirty, Mary walked all the way back across town to feed Max and herself and to sit for a while (so she said) with a cup of hot chocolate on the table at her side. But by six o'clock she would be back, setting up the dulcimer in her corner off of the stage, and by seven she would be changed and made up and ready to go out.

Mary acted with great enthusiasm, without ever once making me forget who she was. She played crafty artisan women and bubbly girls fifteen years younger than herself, bluestockings and peasantry and fairies, and filled in wherever a feminine form was needed. Everyone in the company played multiple parts, but Mary had it worse than the rest, for when she was not on stage she was playing music to keep the action flowing along, and during intermissions she would appear before the curtain, guitar in hand, to play Hoagy Carmichael tunes for those who cared to listen. She never had a break, and apparently never needed one; the only sign of tiredness she ever showed was when she came around the dark side of the curtain, smiled and blew a loose strand of hair out of her eyes. Then without a word unless it was something about how well the play was going she would take up her next position and set to work, masquerading under the light or turning her face down to the shadowed keyboard.

Mary always stayed late after the show, helping where help was needed, hanging costumes on the one rack if they needed to be cleaned and on the other if they could get through another performance. The picking-up done, we might decide to meet and relax in a little bar down the street; Mary always came along. She drank only red wine, and then only one glass; she talked about other plays she had seen and clothes and movies and Max. She sat in the open end of the booth, well back from the table with her legs crossed and her back straight; when she laughed, she turned her face downward and touched her nose. When the time came to say goodnight, Mary was careful to acknowledge everyone at the table, sometimes taking each of us into her arms. Then she would be off, alone, picking her way over the icy sidewalks with her carpetbag draped like a knapsack over one shoulder and her long coat catching in the night air, whipping around her ankles as she went away down the block.

One day Mary never came in. It was a quarter to nine and no Mary; Lon spread the backdrop out for her (it was a place by the sea) and still no Mary. Ice broke and fell away from the windows, Lon and I swept out the lobby where the canvases she had painted rippled like broadsides at a carnival sideshow -- donkeyman, catwoman, shining knight --and by noon she had still not turned up.

Jones spent the morning on the payphone out by the dressing rooms. Between calls to the cleaners, the printing company, the papers, she dialed Mary's number and stood tapping the 'phone with her pencil, letting it ring perhaps ten times before she hung up at last without talking to anyone. Then she fished out the nickel and waited, dialed again and waited, and hung up.

At eleven fifteen Lon and I began to set up for the evening show. We worked around the painted puddle of seaside as long as we could, then without a word between us we rolled it up, and carried it over to join the others stacked in a rough pyramid-shape against the back wall. Lon would not even meet my eyes. He set out the furniture for scene one with his face closed up, his mouth tight and the keyring jangling at his hip. "Maybe she had to take Max to the vet," I said as we pulled the flats she had painted into place. Lon only looked away and said, "Maybe."

When it was almost time for the afternoon reading, Jones took me aside. "I think you should go down there," she said, scribbling the address out on yellow paper. "Here. Call me if there's any problem. If she doesn't answer the door just get in any way you can. I don't have a key anymore; I don't think Lon does either. Ask him on your way out."

"Why me?" I said.

Jones tore off the sheet and pressed it into my hand. Her face was hard and reserved. "Because you're the only one I can spare."

I went out into the alley just as the Templetons were coming in. They thought I was hunting lunch and beamed at me expectantly; I only crushed the yellow paper in my hand and went slagging past them to the street. It was a bright springlike day. The city was turning into brown water, trickling and gurgling all around. I went on across the avenue, following the distant rumble of the freightyards to the crest of a long hill lined with brown and red apartment buildings. Far down by the river a horrible brown factory with spines and smokestacks sticking out of it loomed over the roofs of the houses. Islands of ice broke in the street. The cars kicked up a shimmering brown spray from under their tires; a little river carried the remains of last year's leaves down to a brown grating.

The number had fallen off of the building where Mary lived. It was a three-family house at the end of a sidestreet down at the bottom of the hill. There were three white porches one on top of the other and a flight of stairs that ran all the way up one side of the building. A ground-floor window had been knocked out and covered over with a hunk of cardboard. All the other windows were black; the house looked empty and cold and unlived in.

I found her name hand-lettered onto a card above the mail slot, Marilyn Eckert in curls of black ink wedged between Dubonnet and Hogan. The inside door was standing open; beyond it was a bare skyblue hallway that creaked when T came in, a plaintive sound that climbed all through the building, top to bottom, walls and floor and ceiling. It was clean enough, the paint was almost new. I went up to the second floor and stood there worrying about what I knew I had to do next.

Her door had two shallow holes where the number had been taken off. It had the battered look of a broom closet. But somewhere on the other side there was a tinny, fluttering recorded band playing, and a recorded voice that whispered at me through the keyhole:

I held my breath; I knocked, and knocked again. The little voice cracked and faded with the music. I waited in the sudden silence, knocked once more and never got an answer.

I was in the middle of counting to twenty when the music started up again, soft on the heels of a rasping needle sound and the shuffle of footsteps. I took hold of the knob and gave it a good hard twist. Like the door below, it was not locked. It scudded over a high spot in the sill where the paint had been rubbed clear. Music spilled out into the stairwell. There wasn't even a chain to keep me out. The door swung open. I said, "Mary?"

It was a barewalled room with rag rugs thrown across the floor and a stool in the corner with a grey-and-white-faced tiger cat sitting on it. A gramophone resting on an upended orange crate sang Reaching for The Moon for the entire house to hear. Of the room's three chairs, two were filled with books. The only other furniture was a ramshackle blue table with a bowl of fruit resting in its center, a patchwork napkin and a pear cut into wedges on a tin plate. I spotted Mary right away. She was sitting in a muddle of paint jars and brushes spread out on a spattered dropcloth in the corner opposite Max. Her legs were crossed, her back straight. She wasn't moving at all.

She had been painting her walls. From the hall I could see that the room was awash in color, but it wasn't until I stepped inside that I noticed the dozens of painted panels, canted at opposing angles and connected by a tapestry pattern of moons and planets and stars, a mural encompassing the whole apartment, doors, windowsills, cupboards. I saw a Punch and Judy play in the wall above Max, a Santa Claus riding a goose, a crucifixion scene and a night city. In one of the panels the Jones Company was putting on a play; the figures were so small that I recognized us only by the painted curtain. In another, factory workers were rioting. I saw crows in human dress and haunted art galleries and a farmer slaughtering pigs. There was too much to see it all. It bled into the other rooms, into the dark.

At first I couldn't tell if the empty space in front of her was a section she had whited out or the only place she hadn't yet covered. Blue paint had dribbled into it from above. It would have been a simple thing to clean up; it surprised me that she hadn't. Max curled his tail around his forelegs, looked at me and said nothing. "Mary," I said again.

Oh its like reaching for the moon, the gramophone said, and wheezed into the final chorus. Max closed his eyes. I went over and knelt on the sheet beside Mary. Her eyes were open, but she wasn't seeing the empty wall. My hand found her shoulder. "Mary," I said. "Everyone's worried."

She tore herself away from whatever was on her mind and gave me a weak little smile. "I'll be fine."

I did not know what to say. I did not know what to do. All I knew was that when she sang from high on the stage sometimes everyone in the company, even Moscow, stopped to listen to her voice. All I knew was her talent. I was crouched in a stranger's room with the record scratching in the background and a thousand painted faces watching. In the end all I could do was ask "Are you sure? Is there anything I can do? Is there anything I can get you?"

Mary thanked me and shook her head. She looked at the floor, then back up at me. "Tell Meg not to worry," she said. "I'll be there in time."

I was shaking when I came out of the room. Halfway down the stairs I heard the singer start in again, wistful as the rest of Mary's room,

before I lost it finally in the vestibule and the brown yard outside.

I went back through the premature thaw. By the time I reached Valenciennes I was so nerved up and angry at myself that I could hardly speak. I told everyone she was fine and would be there in time, but I dragged Jones off into a dark corner alone and hissed and whispered at her "What was I supposed to do? Why did you send me there? I've never seen her so unhappy. How could I help her? What do I know about her? She was she was -- "

"She's not a Martian," Jones said. We were standing behind the cyclorama; her face was all blue. "Use your head. What do you think it could be?"

"She wouldn't tell me. But it had to be something big."

"It's been a perfect little season," Jones said.

I swallowed hard and thought about Mary in the painted room. "What the hell is that supposed to mean?"

"I told her. I'm telling you. The rest will know in a few days."

"No," I said.

When Mary finally came in it was just as if she was coming back after feeding Max his dinner. There was a slight edge of redness around her eyes, but she gave us the same chilled, good-evening smile and paused to knock the slush off her boots. Nobody mentioned the afternoon, or broke out of their usual pattern: when Lon came by with his case of sound effects he only said "hey Mary," and grinned and kept on walking. I was the only one who gave her a second look, and even then I did not say what was on my mind. She went around to hang up her coat and hat, and as she passed through again on her way to the stage she took me by the arm, gave me a squeeze and smiled. And that was that. She set up her dulcimer in the corner off stage right, and by seven she was changed and made up and ready to go out.