by Janet Dawson
I shook my head and tried to focus on The Nutcracker, who had come to life and joined his epic battle with the Rat King. Make-believe rats and soldiers danced around the stage. I shifted in my seat. Duffy glanced at me. He grinned, reached out, and took my hand. With an effort I pushed thoughts of Maureen Smith and her daughter from my mind and settled back to watch the Snow Queen and her Cavalier dance.
At the intermission we strolled out to the upper lobby, looking down on the front lobby below, crowded with adults dressed in everything from fancy clothes to blue jeans.
“It sure looks different all lit up,” Duffy drawled, recalling our tour a couple of weeks ago.
“I get another crack at it tomorrow,” I told him. “With Dad, my brother, and sister-in-law. And the kids. I hope my niece and nephew don’t get bored.”
“With all the nooks and crannies in this place? They’ll love it. Sounds like y’all have got a busy weekend planned.”
He took my arm as we slowly descended the curving staircase, joining the crowd of people milling around the green and gold lobby. Tables were set up around the Christmas tree in the middle, where the ballet company sold all sorts of things to help defray expenses. Amid the merchandise I spotted a stack of glossy-covered books about the Paramount. I glanced at the tall man next to me. He was so interested in the theater’s architecture I was sure he’d like to have it.
Duffy saw someone he knew and strolled over to say hello. I leaned over the table, reaching for one of the books, which I quickly purchased and tucked between the pages of my program. After all, a Christmas present should be a surprise. As I turned away from the table a little girl whirled into me.
“Tanisha,” her mother admonished, seizing the hand of her would-be Sugar Plum Fairy. “I’m so sorry. I don’t know what got into her.”
“Don’t worry about it,” I told her. “It’s a seasonal rite of passage.”
Years ago, before the Paramount had been closed and then restored, Dad used to go to movies there, with his mother and father and later on his own. That was back in the days when the grit and smoke from years of use blurred the theater’s original beauty, and popcorn and candy counters had been installed in the lobby. I suspected Dad wanted to take the tour for sentimental reasons. So here I was again, on the third Saturday morning in December, joining a tour group at the Twenty-first Street entrance to the theater.
Our tour guide was the same silver-haired man named Joseph who had conducted the tour Duffy and I had taken two weeks earlier. As he collected a dollar from each of the dozen or so people in the group, he told us he’d worked at the theater as both an usher and a stagehand.
I had a feeling Dad and my brother would enjoy the tour more than the children, but Todd and Amy seemed fascinated by the cookie-cutter ceiling. Dad and Brian had a grand old time examining the parquet floor and the Hungarian ash paneling in the men’s room on the mezzanine. They tilted their heads upward and stared at the bas-relief ceiling details while the kids fingered the oval black marble table in the mezzanine lounge.
Sheila and I caught up on the family news. They were planning to spend Christmas with my mother in Monterey.
“I haven’t even done my shopping yet,” I said, keeping an eye on Todd, who had just turned six. He had already scoped out the curved banister and announced that sliding down it to a spectacular landing in the Grand Lobby certainly looked like it would be way cool. Our guide raised his snowy eyebrows as my brother stepped between his son and temptation.
“At the rate I’m going,” I continued, “you may not get your presents until Twelfth Night.”
Sheila laughed. “That’s okay. Just makes the season last longer. Did you ever find that woman you were looking for? The one who sells produce at the farmers’ market?”
I nodded. “She and her husband own a farm near Sebastopol. She answered some of my questions. And provided me with a lot more to be answered.”
“What’s this case about?”
“A missing two-year-old girl,” I said, looking at my niece in her red-and-green-checked dress and her white tights. She was nearly four, almost two years older than Dyese Smith. Amy Howard was loved and wanted and cared for, and her world was light-years away from the child I wasn’t having much luck finding.
Dad said his mother was Jerusha Layne, a Hollywood bit player in the movies of the thirties and forties, including The Women with Norma Shearer. Joseph smiled and said he must have seen Grandma on the silver screen, since The Women was one of his favorites. As they talked, Amy and Todd played with the telephone dials on a tall, free-standing contraption which stood near the stairs in the mezzanine lobby.
“Grandpa, what’s this thing?” Todd asked.
“It’s a seat annunciator.” Dad turned to Joseph. “I can remember back far enough when they were still using it.”
Joseph smiled. “Then you can explain how it was used.”
“Why, the ushers used it to keep track of seat availability. Back when movie theaters had ushers.” Dad deftly removed his grandchildren’s hands from the annunciator. “People would line up in the lobby and the ushers would use these gizmos to locate vacant seats.”
“Way cool,” Todd said, his fingers visibly itching to finger the dial. “Boy, this place is not like going to the movies at the mall.”
“Definitely not,” I assured him.
Joseph led us into the auditorium, where he sat us down in the balcony, above the spot where Duffy and I had viewed The Nutcracker the night before. He explained that the theater had 2,998 seats and talked about the Wurlitzer pipe organ visible at stage right. Sheila, who works with textiles, was drawn into the guide’s story about the mohair upholstery and the hand-sewn curtain.
Then we trooped back downstairs to the lower level lounge, where a bar and rest rooms were located, as well as the black lacquer room which had served as the women’s smoking lounge back when everyone smoked.
“Can we go see the stage?” Todd asked.
Joseph grinned. He looked like a peppery old wizard as he put his hands on the children’s shoulders. “I have a surprise for you,” he said. “It’s a magic mirror.”
He walked into the men’s lounge, where our party was reflected in a long floor-to-ceiling mirrored wall. On the left, one panel of the wall swung open at Joseph’s touch, revealing a ramp leading to a narrow corridor. Todd and Amy stood in the doorway and stared into the secret passage.
“Where does it go?” Amy asked in a hushed voice.
“You remember all those seats we just saw in the auditorium?” Joseph stepped into the opening and beckoned. “There’s a long tunnel that goes underneath, all the way to the stage.”
We followed our guide through the looking glass and into the corridor, which seemed to be too short to run beneath the auditorium. He shut the mirrored door behind us and led the way to another corridor which intersected this one at right angles. We turned right as Joseph explained that this was where the theater’s administrative offices were located. Then we turned left again, into the long corridor Joseph had called a tunnel. It was quite narrow for a group of people walking together. As we made our way toward the stage, Todd and Amy kept looking up, thinking about all those seats above us.
At the end we turned left at another crossways corridor, past a big room Joseph called the performers’ lounge, and into the trap room. “Like trapdoors?” Todd asked.
“Yes, but there aren’t any traps at the Paramount.” Joseph gestured around the utilitarian room with its black-painted steel beams and concrete floor. “We’re right under the stage now. This ramp leads to the orchestra pit. That’s where the musical instruments are.”
“What’s that rumbling sound?” Dad asked, pinpointing the background noise that had grown louder on our journey back to the bowels of the theater. It was the organ blower room, Joseph told us as he led the way toward the stairs. The noise was the constant rush of air blowing through chambers on either side of the stage. It was quite loud as we stepped past the op
en door and peered in.
The stairs brought us up to the wings on stage right, then out onto the stage itself, where the group clustered around the huge Wurlitzer theater organ as Joseph showed us where its twenty-six ranks of pipes were hidden in large silver-shuttered chambers on either side of the stage. The scarlet, silver, and gold curtain was open and we could see the rows of empty seats stretching back into darkness. Behind us the scenery for the ballet was pushed against the back wall and in the wings on either side of the stage.
“You should come down some night for the movies,” I told Brian. “They have a classic movie series on Fridays, and sometimes on Saturdays they show the old silents, accompanied by the organ. It’s really a lot of fun.”
“Do they make magic here?” Todd asked from the middle of the stage. His head was tilted back as he gazed up at the flies, so high above.
“Yes,” I told him. “This afternoon, and again tonight.” I pointed out at the darkened theater, all the empty seats lined up and waiting. Then Todd and I walked to the edge of the pit and looked down. “People will come to the performance and they’ll hear the orchestra tuning, right there in the pit. See where all those chairs and music stands are?” Todd peered at the music stands and the piano. “Have you ever seen a live performance before?”
“At school,” he said, “but this is different.”
“Yes, it really is.” I’d done some acting in college as well as a little theater group in San Francisco. Now my experience with amateur theatricals kicked in and I felt once again the excitement of putting on greasepaint and waiting offstage for my cue. I took my nephew’s arm and pointed at the ropes and counterweights at stage left. “That’s what controls all the scenery,” I told him. “And the backdrops and the cyclorama and the legs. They’re all hanging from pipes above the stage. Those weights have to equal the weight of what’s hanging on the pipes.”
In the shadowy wings on either side of the stage I saw movement and heard voices. The stagehands were here, getting ready for the afternoon matinee of The Nutcracker. The dancers too, making their way to the backstage dressing rooms. My niece, seized by the spell of the theater, began pirouetting across the stage. She bumped into one of the sets and stumbled off into the wings at stage left, near the light board.
What was it about proximity to the ballet that made little girls want to twirl around like tops? I hurried after her. When I reached the wings I saw someone kneeling in front of Amy. She was a girl-woman with a dancer’s slender body under her ragamuffin torn jeans and sweater, a big nylon tote bag on the floor next to her.
“Another apprentice,” she said with a smile for me and for Amy. In her street clothes she looked much like the other dancers in the dim backstage area. Was she one of the Sugar Plum Fairies or did she battle on the side of the Rat King? Amy was dazzled and speechless as I took her hand.
At that moment I saw a face that looked familiar and I narrowed my eyes. A young man standing in a doorway, a stagehand or a dancer, I guessed. No, it was Emory Marland.
“Hello, Emory,” I said. “I thought you were working at the Golden Gate.” I knew otherwise from my call to his union. I wanted to see what the young man’s reaction would be.
He looked a little surprised at being caught in his lie. “Oh, this gig came up,” he said, a bit vaguely, running a hand through his sandy hair. His blue eyes shifted, not meeting mine. “Pays better. Gotta go.”
I wanted more information from Emory, whether he wanted to talk with me or not, but my four-year-old niece was tugging on my hand. “I want to see the dance,” Amy announced plaintively.
“We’re going to the city,” I told her, staring at the doorway where Emory was no longer visible. “To see Ebenezer Scrooge.”
“But I want to see it here.”
“You’ll have to take that up with your folks.” There were advantages to being an aunt rather than a parent.
We walked back to center stage to rejoin the tour group. I handed Amy off to her mother as the guide led the tour group offstage and up one of the aisles in the dark auditorium, its empty seats waiting to embrace their next audience. The youngster had repeated her request several times when we returned to the tour’s starting point, the box office entrance.
“We could get tickets for the Sunday matinee,” Dad said, checking the performance list at the box office, which had just opened. “I haven’t seen The Nutcracker in a while. I’m sure the kids would love it. It’s such a treat to see it at the Paramount.”
Brian and Sheila traded a telepathic married couple look, then Brian shrugged. “I’m game. Let’s do it Jeri, do you want to join us?”
I shook my head vigorously. “I’ve seen it twice in the space of a week. I’m Nutcrackered out.”
Brian stepped up to the box office and purchased five seats in the balcony for tomorrow’s matinee. Then we headed out to the street for the next phase of our weekend adventure, a ride on BART over to San Francisco. The city was crowded and noisy and alive with people and traffic, cable car bells mingling with the tingle of Salvation Army bell ringers with their red kettles, asking for donations from the Christmas shoppers thronging the sidewalks surrounding Union Square. The sky was gray, but so far the rain had held off. We had a light lunch before joining the playgoers who crowded the foyer of the Geary Theatre.
The American Conservatory Theater’s production of A Christmas Carol was an annual ritual for the company. I didn’t see it every year, but when I did I was charmed by the life they brought to the old Dickens tale, from the wonderful costumes and music to the innovative set, which was stripped bare during the performance, even as Dickens’s tale stripped bare the soul of Ebeneezer Scrooge. Each time I saw the show, it brought a smile to my face, from the dancing antics of Mr. and Mrs. Fezziwig to the joy of Scrooge’s redemption.
Today the darker side of Dickens’s narrative came rocketing at me from the stage, unsettling in its freshness, nearly 150 years after the words were penned. I stared through the darkness at the pool of light on the stage, words ringing in my ears, and I saw not men in Victorian costumes, but the homeless people lining the streets outside the theater, hands outstretched as they asked for spare change. Not all the Christmas crowds we’d seen on Union Square and Market Street carried shopping bags from Macy’s or Nordstrom or Neiman-Marcus. Too many of them were like Denny, carrying all their possessions in duffel bags, ignored by those of us with money in our pockets and roofs over our heads. Why, I wondered, is it so easy to ignore them?
On stage Marley’s ghost asked Scrooge a question. “What evidence would you have beyond that of your own senses?”
Amy dozed on her father’s lap, but Todd was rapt with attention as the pleasant spirits of Scrooge’s past gave way to the Cratchit family of Scrooge’s present. Then the present edged toward the darkness of Scrooge’s future. I watched and felt as I always did the chill of prescience in Dickens’s words as the Ghost of Christmas Present walked slowly toward Scrooge and swept aside his rich red robe to reveal two scrawny and ragged children, huddled beneath its folds.
“Spirit! Are they yours?” Scrooge asked, appalled.
“They are Man’s,” said the Spirit, looking down upon them. “And they cling to me, appealing from their fathers. This boy is Ignorance. This girl is Want. Beware them both, and all of their degree, but most of all beware this boy, for on his brow I see that written which is Doom, unless the writing be erased.”
“Have they no refuge or resource?” cried Scrooge.
“Are there no prisons?” said the Spirit, turning on him for the last time with his own words. “Are there no workhouses?”
Thirty-one
“WE’VE ALWAYS HAD HOMELESS PEOPLE IN THIS country,” my father said.
“The poor will always be with us?” I countered.
“Unfortunate, but true,” Dad said. “This isn’t some phenomenon out of the blue. We should look at the historical context. This is a repeating cycle.”
I shook my head. “Too easy
. It’s an excuse for not doing anything.”
“What should we do?” my brother asked.
I didn’t respond. From my vantage point into the kitchen doorway I looked around the round oak table, set for six. It was Sunday evening, a chilly damp night. We were all warm and dry here in my apartment. And about to be well-fed, since I had, wonder of wonders, cooked dinner.
While Dad and the others had gone to the Sunday matinee of The Nutcracker at the Paramount, I finally hauled the Christmas paraphernalia out of the closet and decorated the apartment. It wasn’t that the seasonal spirit had finally come upon me. I just wanted to forestall any questions about why I hadn’t put up a tree this late in December. I don’t like artificial trees and didn’t feel like scouting a lot for a small and overpriced cut pine. Instead I festooned my rubber plant and a ficus benjamina with tinsel. They didn’t look like Christmas trees, but they looked festive.
Then I cooked. Dinner was waiting, the apartment filled with warmth and mouth-watering aromas, when Dad and the others arrived after the performance. The children had delighted in the ballet’s color and music, so much so that they clamored for more. I dug around in a pile of CDs for the score and put it in the player, amused to see both my nephew and niece bound around my living room as though they were on stage in tights and tutus. Abigail quickly decided these extra humans were too much, particularly if they planned on being this disruptive. She retreated to the bedroom, where she joined Black Bart, already hiding in the closet.
Dad poured wine for the grown-ups and handed round the glasses. I saw him pick up the raku pot I’d bought from Serena, examining it with an appreciative glint in his eye. Maybe I should give it to him for Christmas. He set it down, turning to me. The kids enjoyed the ballet, he said, more than they had the darker-edged chronicle of Scrooge’s Christmas we had seen the afternoon before.
But Scrooge’s words stayed with me. I couldn’t get them out of my mind. “Are there no prisons? Are there no workhouses?”
