Mr. DeLodges had only to come down a narrow, whitewashed flight of stairs from his rooms above the office; even so, most mornings I still managed to arrive before him and get through much of the first mail before I heard the distant creaking from between the floors that let me know he was on his way. Age had slowed him down some, but he still insisted on making his own breakfast and dressing himself in the ancient three piece suits that he wore, fully pressed and tightly buttoned even in the hottest weather, that made him look like a tintype from the century before. And so I was surprised that morning when I came up from the street and found him already settled behind his desk, cutting open a letter with such enthusiasm that he nearly spilled his coffee. "Winston," he said, raising his eyes so that I had just a flash of grey before they turned back to the contents of the envelope. "You look tired. Did you go down to the theater again?"

"Yes," I said, unable to look at him, as if under the force of his will I could tell no lie. "But it's not that. I didn't sleep well. I think"

For a moment the office was as still as if we had never entered it. Then Mr. DeLodges sat back in his chair. The leather breathed out a long sigh under the shifting of his bones, his face came half into the pale windowlight. I was flattered once again, as in so many other times, to have his full attention. "What?" he said. "What do you think?"

How could I say it? On that first, hot afternoon, when at any other time I would have been at home mowing the lawn or reading a book out in the dust and sun of the never-used alley that ran behind our back yard, Jones invited me to watch a performance from the other side of the proscenium. It was the most exotic thing I had ever seen, the players rushing in silence through the darkness of the wings, their faces painted so that they might have been illustrations come to life, familiar creatures with bright eyes and expressions like masks from the other side of sleep. They were nothing but polite, when they noticed me. Pausing with their profiles soft against the curtain, they would adjust some portion of their costume, or close their eyes, or whisper something secretly to themselves before being drawn out into the folds of the play, from where their voices might echo for an hour or more before the blackout that followed close on their final, whispered lines.

The mechanics of what they did amazed me: alone behind the painted scenes the big man, whose name was Lon, worked the lights from a luminescent switchboard, turning away now and then to hoist a glass globe filled with water that represented the moon, or to crank a barrel-shaped machine that made cloth waves roll by in the distance. He howled banshee-calls through a cardboard megaphone, pounded on thick sheets of metal to send a convincing thunder rolling through the stalls all the way out to the lobby. With the help of the actors, he raised entire buildings and peeled away their fronts, erecting room after room for the characters to settle into, while on the other side of the curtain, the invisible fourth wall, the audience glanced at their programs or whispered to each other, knowing nothing of the work being done just out of their sight.

I did not know what I was supposed to listen for, to learn, but I stayed with them all the way through their final performance of the day, which ended just before midnight. With some guidance, I helped them pack their plays away into night-colored trunks; in return for that, or out of simple politeness, Jones asked to see some more of my writing. So I must have looked a bit shell-shocked, riding home alone with the streetcar rattling almost empty on its long trip out into the suburbs. It was the first night of the full moon, the first cool night in more than a month of wetness and heat, and I took no notice of it.

I went back to them the next day and the day after that, and for two weeks thereafter, the entirety of their stay, I gave them all my free hours, my weekends, my nights. Until that time, Mr. DeLodges had been used to finding me at work as late as ten or eleven o clock; now I left while there was still light in the sky. In the ten blocks that separated the office from the playhouse I had just enough time to tease myself along, to wonder what I would walk into, what I would see, what play they would offer, and to worry if this would be the day when their indifference to me turned into open hostility. Hurry up, I would say to myself. Hurry, walking so fast that my legs began to ache, working myself into a breathless, boyish state of awe, as if I was going to be late for them, as if they needed me.

Two days before they were to move along to another town, I was approached by Mary Eckert. I had noticed her in a number of small parts, but it was offstage that she did her most important work, playing mandolin or dulcimer to accompany the action of the play, or singing lovely ghostlike ballads in the intervals between acts. She was taller than what she seemed, with a long, delicate face and hands that moved when she spoke. Though fair, she seemed as much a gypsy as any of them, in her second-hand dresses so faded and patched as to be truly elegant. On the stage her best quality was a pleasing sort of wistfulness, something that I took to be a professional facade until I saw that it followed her nearly all the time, even when she was alone, like a breath of melancholy so distant as to be almost forgotten.

She took me aside during The Twilight of The Gods. In a little dressing room that I had never seen before, far back from the stage, she drew a thick, well-traveled folio out from under the satchel that came with her every morning from the hotel. Its edges were tied up with lengths of black string; inside, there were pages and pages of intricate drawings, all splashed with color, marked over with arrows and pencilled notations. "I thought that you might like to see these," she said softly, standing so that I could look over her shoulder as she spread three of them out under the dim light. They were set designs for a series of monstrous, Gothic rooms, laced with spiderwebs and filled to brimming with arcane memorabilia set out on moonlit shelves. I saw jars with deformed fetuses floating in the depths of pencilled muck. I saw an empty casket leaning so that the figure painted onto its lid caught just the farthest edge of light. I saw a wildeyed horse made of metal, with a lightning rod for a tail; and, on a velvet-covered pedestal at the end of the room, gleaming with golden skin, its eyes half open like a dead thing, I saw the head of a sphinx.

How, then? It seemed foolish to me now, in the cool of Mr. DeLodges's office, solid wood and leather all around, the supreme egotism to say I think they are going to produce a play from a story of mine, that assumption based on a furtive peek at some drawings a stranger had shown to me in an off-moment from the fall of Zeus and Wotan. How could I tell him?

Mr. DeLodges sat with his fingers folded, his eyes bright and alert, his ears like a bull elephant's jutting out at right angles from his head. He looked at me with what might have been a growing amusement. "Not to act, I hope," he said at last. "Never to act"

"Pardon?" I said.

He took up his pen from the edge of the blotter, dipped it, and brought out a single sheet of his personal letterhead, the kind with just his name at the top, no pictures of steaming pies or sweet rolls dripping with icing. Without any hesitation, any pause to find the words, he began to fill the paper with handwriting as graceful as a woman's, the letters growing tails that dangled well into the characters of the line below. "You look all right, I suppose," he said as he wrote. "But your face is too open. You haven't forgotten the portion they still owe? I know you think well of them, but I'm not inclined to give them a two hundred and fifty dollar gift"

His name appeared an inch from the bottom of the page. He blotted the note, turned it in his hands, and passed it across to me. It began:

This is to introduce Winston Howe, a fine

I held the paper out almost at arm's length. It quivered in my fingers like the wings of a moth. "You've made a mistake," I said. "I'm not leaving. I'm"

"All right then," he said. I could not tell whether or not he thought I meant it, or if he thought I had made a good choice. He took back the note and folded it twice, then tucked it into the bookshelf that stood at his side, so that an inch or so of paper stuck out from between The American Boy's Handy Book and The Plays of Christopher Marlowe. "But you must be a strong man. Stronger than I ever thought. Or else just dull. Because if I was your age, I would already be lost."

And he turned back to the mail, working down through the stack with that old appearance of satisfaction settling back into the corners of his face. "Interesting batch," he said when he had dealt with it all. "Not a sign of bad news."

I was on the road from ten until noon, traveling down to the capitol plant and back in Mr. DeLodges's own silver Packard. For the sake of the interior I drove with the top up and fastened tight, even in the heat of the morning; by the time I reached the factory I was as breathless as if I had run the whole way. I spent half an hour acting as Mr. DeLodges's eyes and ears, trying to sort the real from the hopeful in the supervisor's talk as he walked me through the building. At last I was led upstairs to a cool yellow office. They gave me the week's paperwork all done up in a bundle tied with string, and a pie just off of the line. It was so fresh that I could feel its warmth through the box bottom. From its place on the seat beside me it filled the old car with the smell of cherries and heat, soft at first from around the corners, then rising up under the windshield until I knew it had settled even into my clothes.

I still smelled of cherry pie when I came in through the front of the theater and saw Jones alone on the open stage, setting up Prospero's sanctum for the first act of The Tempest. In the ungelled light her face and hands were pale as limestone, her hair tied back carelessly, dotted with flecks of color from the night before. "You're early," she said when I had come halfway down the aisle. Far behind her words, I could hear what sounded like an army drilling in the wings at her back.

"It's a business visit," I said. "I'm on another mission for Mr. DeLodges."

The stage floor, like her workclothes, was smudged with a fine white dust. In places around where the action was to take place, crosses and stars had been chalked onto the boards. "Well?" Jones said. "That's no crime."

When we passed through the green room I saw what the racket was all about. The company was packing, setting their trunks in a neat pile by the stage door. Lon and Moscow had already started to lift them out into the yard. "Everything that we don't need for tonight," Jones said from over her shoulder. "It's all going onto the truck."

"When are you leaving?" I said.

"Right after the curtain. As soon as we get Father William put away. We'll drive all night."

Jones had set up a kind of office in a corner of her dressing room. It was nothing more than a black box, a ledger book and some papers spread out any which way under a tiny lamp that made as much shadow as it did light. In the pages of the open book I could follow the flow of the company from city to city, through battered hotel rooms, truck repairs, food and supplies and paint and the price of a hall. "Here," Jones said, as I studied the numbers. "I've got something of yours"

She lifted out a small sheaf of yellow paper. It was my stack of foolish stories, Whisperings, In The Dream House, Heirloom, and The Funeral, set down in the wavering characters of the office typewriter, marked by my many scratchings-out. The pages opened in my hands. There was new writing in the margins, a decisive, almost mystical hand that matched the notations of the ledger, black ink that now and then crept between the typed lines.

They were long, thoughtful comments, snatches of dialogue that I had only hinted at, questions about the characters, and hints at how the events could be turned and expanded on the stage. "Thank you," I said, trying not to read them at once, not knowing whether it was the notes or the thought of the company leaving by night that kept me from saying the thing that I had come to say. I had formed the words more than two hours before. It should have been easy to say them. But I could not.

And so we stood in silence for more than a minute, Jones with her eyes perfectly still and her face framed in blackness. Then she said, so quietly that it was almost a whisper, "If you make a change like that you will have to do it fast. Sometimes not making a decision is the same thing as making one."

I folded the pages away carefully into a pocket of my briefcase. "Yes," I said at last.

Still, I could not make up my mind. It was easy, there in the heart of the theater, and just as easy to slip back when I was safe in my own chair on the far side of Mr. DeLodges's desk. In the office I had nothing more demanding to do than answer the telephone, or double check the sales figures from the capitol plant. I had no questions that could not be answered by a simple trip to the filing cabinet. I would have only to deal with my failure to collect the rent. I could live with that; I had even saved enough money to cover it, if that was what he wanted.

I had just decided that I would not go back down to that place, that nightmare theater, when the bell that Mr. DeLodges had himself hung over the door, the one that hadn't worked in more than a year, gave a good loud ding-a-ling in the next room, and Jones stepped in from the landing outside. She came straight through without bothering to knock, looking more like a lady pilot than an actress, nodding at me in passing as if we had never met. "Margaret Darwin," she said with her hand extended above the desktop and her head slightly cocked so that she could meet his eyes. "Up from the Jones Company. I'm your tenant player."

"Nelson DeLodges," he said, and there again was all of his old strength, his old charm. He came out of his chair with such ease that I began to wonder if he was not a pretty fair actor himself. "Tenant player, hey? What can I do for you?"

Jones held his hand in hers, and caused her face to mirror his own. "To start with, I'd like it very much if you would show me your library."

She had seen the third room, where beyond a tall arch the walls were lined with leather-bound volumes. Later, she told me that it seemed the perfect place to fight it out: she would have all of history at her back, a conquering army of print and myth. "Of course," Mr. DeLodges said. "After you. I think I might even have some things that would interest a Tenant Player"

They moved slowly along the walls, reading the embossed spines, pausing every few moments to take something down. They acted like old friends. Try not to look up, I said to myself. Work. But the numbers no longer made any sense; I pushed them around on the page and got different totals every time. Now and then a whisper would filter out to me, shapeless as smoke, too fragmented to understand. It was worse than not being able to hear anything.

They sat together in the library for nearly an hour. Across town, her company would be readying The Tempest, raising banners, brushing off costumes, checking the lights. In another half hour they would open the doors; it might take her that long just to get back to the theater. Mary Eckert could cover for her with a patriotic tune. Perhaps I should call them, I thought, and warn them to play for time.

"Ask Winston," Jones might have said, when at last they came around to the reason for her visit. "He saw my books. I made a point of it."

Mr. DeLodges would only have folded his hands, leaving two fingers up in the shape of a steeple. "Yes, that's what I hear. And yet he tells me that for the better part of your stay you've been playing to houses that were very nearly full."

"More nearly half full. Winston tends to see things in a rosier light."

Records could be checked, but Mr. DeLodges would not have asked for that. It could not have been a pleasant moment for him; he disliked being railroaded as much as he disliked a fight. He had no qualms about locking horns with a woman, but it must have bothered him that they were circling about a thing as important as the theater. "Just how good are you, Miss Darwin?" he might have said. "How deserving of my charity? That I would like to know."

"You can come down and see. You could have come down at any time."

He wouldn't bother to answer that, it was not any of her business. He might even have known that it was not meant for an answer, that he had lost ground by letting her say it. And so the corners of his mouth would have turned down sharply by the time he spoke, and then he would have said only: "Tenant player"

That was when he might have seen the idea: his own voice echoing for the third time that thing she had planted, and the roadweary Jones sitting opposite with her unhuman calm, her hands resting motionless one over the other just above her knees, her eyes never wavering, never leaving his. "Tenant player," he would whisper again, thinking I've skunked her. And yet she seems to be asking for it before adding at last: "Winston tells me that you work magic on the stage. Could you work it here?"

" -- In this building?"

"In this library. In this room. Let's say that you need to give one more performance to cover your rent. Could you and your company work your magic without props? Without scenery or trap doors or costumes? Without trickery? If you could, that would surely be worth two hundred and fifty dollars to me"

I imagine her taking a quick survey of the room and everything in it, every door that led in, every window looking out. She'd have studied the rafters and the distance between the cases; she wouldn't have missed a single frayed edge in the rug, a single knot in the wood. When she met his eyes again it would be with one eyebrow cocked, and an expression that had just enough assurance in it, just enough doubt. "All right," she would say. "Name the play."

"What's in your repertoire? Shakespeare, of course"

"Of course. Even Titus Andronicus, if you like that sort of thing."

"Marlowe?"

"Second rate. But we know them."

"Moliere? Ibsen?"

The softest of smiles. "Ah, now you're playing into my hands" Ask on, she would say. But by then the dusk would be coming down in the corners of the room, and the bargain would have to be closed. Perhaps it would be "Surprise me," or perhaps "You'll think of something," in a lowering voice with just a hint of its full carrying power. "I'm late. It will be eleven thirty before we've finished over there. Is that all right?"

At a quarter to six they rose together and again shook hands across the map-covered table. They were still talking about books when they came out, Jones grinning at a comment I hadn't heard, buttoning her jacket though it was not cold outside. She slapped me once on the back the way a man might have, the way my father had done sometimes when I was a child. "Don't go away," she said as she passed. When she had gone Mr. DeLodges came and stood looking past me, all black and white with a face like a man who had no choices left. "It's not decided yet," he said. "But it will be."

I called my parents ten minutes later to tell them that I would not be home for dinner. 'It's to do with that Jones woman, isn't it?" my mother said from down the length of the wire, her voice made flat as tin by the ancient office receiver.

"Yes," I said.

"Well be careful." I said I would, and then ran down to the diner at the end of the block to get some sandwiches. It was going to be a long wait.

The clock-hands had almost touched. "How many names does she have?" Mr. DeLodges asked for the second time, and at that moment we heard soft sounds drifting up from the street below. He turned his face owleyed up to mine. "Can it be them?" he said; without answering, I went through into the office to wait alone. It will never be the same place again, I thought, switching out the lights on the mantel, wall and desk. A distant glow had laid itself against the frosted glass in the first room. I sat in the dark, in Mr. DeLodges's own chair, and watched as it gathered itself and began to grow whispering shadows from the bottom of the frame.

At first I thought they were wearing masks. But it was only the remains of their make-up left over from the evening show, their skins an unnatural orange, hard black lines drawn into the crevices below their eyes, along their cheekbones. They came one by one in their travel-worn coats, each with a flashlight or a candle or a kerosene lamp in their hands. The seven of them filled the outer room. Then Jones came forward with the lamplight flickering yellow across her face, and said, "Is he here?"

"He's inside," I said.

She turned under the arch, leaving a streak on the air, a tail of light in her wake. The company followed without a word. They formed a glowing line across the center of the library, shuffling some, their tiredness showing, their lamps floating waist high. It was Lon Burden, their Man Behind The Curtain, who paused with his flashlight making a pool at his feet, and found me in the dark. "You coming?" he said softly.

I said I guess I am, and he motioned me ahead with the light. Inside, the library looked like some archaic throne room, with Mr. DeLodges in the seat of power, his back up against the east wall and the low table like a dais at his feet. He sat uncomfortably as if he were the one on display, slightly hunched with his right hand covering his mouth. "Winston," he said. "Perhaps you should do the introductions."

I came around the line. It was the first time I had ever spoken before a group; my voice sounded pretty soft. "Folks," I said, "this is my boss, Mr. DeLodges. Mr. D., this is the Jones Company: Sylvie Lindstromm, Ruth Templeton, Peter Moscow, Margaret Darwin, Claude Templeton, Mary Eckert, Lon Burden."

Everyone bowed. At last Jones took one step forward out of the line. "Well," she said. "What's it to be?"

We waited in the wavering light, the growing stench of kerosene. Then Mr. DeLodges coughed. From the look in his eyes I thought he would let them go. I thought it right up until he opened his mouth.

"Saint Joan," he said.

Jones said nothing. She looked back over her left shoulder, then over her right. A faint smile crept into her eyes. She bowed her head over the black chimney of her lamp, and slowly vanished.

Late in the second scene, Joan lifted her eyes to mine. Her face had been recently washed, and had something in it that I could not bear to look at. We were alone and not alone: the men and women of the court had left the scene, but I could see them there still at the farthest edge of the candlelight, watching silently with their arms crossed, their faces thoughtful and low. "Art afraid?" Joan said.

Had I imagined it? "Yes: I am afraid. It's no use preaching to me about it" It was the little blonde, Sylvie, in the part. It did not even matter that she was playing a man: her voice was just right for his undetermined character; it made him seem younger than his years. It answered for us both.

"Blethers!" Joan said. She used a simple, artless voice that could have commanded the moon, yet there was something coaxing in it as well, something that hinted of the black current that ran in her veins. She lifted her hands as if to receive his heart, then closed them into fists. "We are all like that to begin with. I shall put courage into thee."

Now the Dauphin turned his face away, exactly as I had done a moment before. "But I don't want to have courage put into me. I want to sleep in a comfortable bed, and not live in continual terror of being killed or wounded. Put courage into the others, and let them have their bellyful of fighting, but let me alone."

"It's no use, Charlie," Joan said, so that now in the straightbacked chair against the books I felt the same chill that had come to me in my own bed on the night I first met her. "Thou must face what God puts on thee."

It was Jones, as much as the spirit of the martyred farmgirl, who ended by asking God when the world would be ready for saints. "How long, 0 Lord, how long?" standing alone with the light dying behind her until all we could see was a glimpse of her silhouette against a patch of blue-black, windowframed sky. At last even her shape faded away, leaving only a perfect silence, in which I could have believed that the library had been emptied, that I alone still occupied it. Then Mr. DeLodges coughed in the dark beside me. "Thank you," he said. "I guess that was the best bet I ever lost. I have to say that I don't mind it a bit."

An answering laugh and a spatter of applause went around the room. Lights snapped on in the outer office. The actors came out of the corners and stood in a broken row. They looked tired and relieved and a little happy. They looked as if they had fought a hard battle and won it, none more so than Jones, who took a long, low bow at Mr. DeLodges's feet, straightened, gave him an off-hand salute, and grinned. "I hate that play," she said. "Only Shaw could write Joan as a supporting part in her own story. Whatever made you choose it?"

"I wanted to win," Mr. DeLodges said. He stepped down and was surrounded by the company. He shook their hands and patted them on the shoulder and said the things that they deserved to hear. He spoke to each one of them in turn, asking about their backgrounds, their favorite parts, and the parts that they would someday like to play.

I waited around on the edge of the group until I thought it was safe. Then I slipped away. The outer office was cool by comparison, and almost still. I could breathe again. As I put on my coat their voices came through so distant and glad, like a party in the next room. It reminded me of Christmas.

I was just leaving when I saw the letter sticking out from the middle of the third shelf. I had never really forgotten it; it was there every time I raised my eyes, crowding out the diploma, the photo and the dollar bill that hung on the wall beyond. Strong, he had said. Or else just dull. Very dull indeed.

It made the softest of hissing sounds coming out from between the books. I was going to put it in my pocket, take it home, maybe frame it. I was tired of looking at it there. At least that was what I told myself.

"Well, matey. You haven't said a word." It was Jones leaning in from the library, her weight against the jamb, her arms crossed. She looked like every part I'd seen her play. She looked like a horrible, beautiful blur.

"Goodbye," I said.

Jones almost laughed. "Now that was good," she said. "Perfectly simple, but loaded with subtext. I like that."

I didn't answer. The paper was crisp and sharp in my hands. I thought that she would just take it. But she made me hand it to her.

She opened it with a simple flick of her wrist, read down through to the signature at the bottom of the page, then handed it back without ever changing her expression. "I don't need this," she said. "But bring it along anyway. You might want it someday."

Mr. DeLodges was still visiting with the others in the next room. He must have felt me watching him; he lifted his eyes, gave me a soft, tired smile. It was the last I ever saw of him.