brick courthouse in the center of town where Indians exchanged shells for the promise of peace and land. A tree shivers in the night air, a taxi idles.
The pale white exterior of this theater is its own phantom. The marquee is dark; you can barely make out the word “Fulton” or the sculpted figure two stories up to whom it refers, a short man with a lantern jaw and a tumble of thick hair who’s doing his best to look Napoleonic in a cutaway coat and flowing cape, hand on his breast. He stands in a vaulted niche that looks as though it belongs above the entrance to a cathedral, and he gazes out on the streets where he played as a boy, more than once with British prisoners of war in a game he and his friends called Rebels and Tories. Eleven-year-old Robert Fulton, eventual inventor of submarines and steamboats, sketched these scenes, he and the other boys leaping across a rope to pummel the enemy.
I was eleven myself when I first set foot inside the Fulton Theatre in downtown Lancaster, Pennsylvania. Johnson was president; the headlines were full of body counts in Southeast Asia. At home, I watched The Monkees every week on TV and listened compulsively to Julie Andrews on my record player. I came to the Fulton for movies and the occasional concert. When a film bored me, I scooched down in one of the theater’s seats and shot my legs up in the air and bicycled. The place was dilapidated, paint peeling and carpets worn. There was talk of tearing it down to build a parking garage. Outside, a neon sign proclaimed, “A Landmark in Motion Picture Making!”
Inside, the spectral faces of Alan Bates and Julie Christie glimmered on the screen. As I watched their love blossom and then burn, I slipped from my own skin into theirs, glad to exchange the tedium of my junior high existence for their pain. I was just waking to the world. The cone of light trembling in the ether above me contained every future I might possibly want: the Austrian hills, a Dorset field, the pomp and circumstance of the Royal Ascot. If I could only reach up and nab a speck of it.
The room was dark, the furnishings shabby, the stage (for I knew there was one behind Bathsheba and Gabriel) a gray, impenetrable cave I longed to investigate. Soon afterward, watching my first plays on that stage, I was struck by how distant things became when they were real. Absent the giant screen we were genuinely little, I saw, but that was OK, because we belonged to a larger and quite beautiful cosmos. Moons flew in unannounced from the flies, summers burst into kaleidoscopic falls. You could see dust mites dancing in the tall black air and the shadows of strangers in the wings; clearly we were surrounded by all kinds of things visible and invisible.
By the time I turned thirteen I’d resolved to make a life for myself in the theater. I took acting lessons and memorized monologues about young women striving to understand themselves (Joan of Arc, Emily Webb). At a moment when I despaired of ever having a boyfriend for more than three consecutive days, I donned a crinoline to play Elizabeth Barrett Browning in a two-person show about love. One day I auditioned for a musical at the Fulton. I must have been sixteen. I wore a pink corduroy Betsey Johnson pantsuit I’d sewn expressly for the occasion. Shortly after I began to sing I realized that I was also, at the same time, standing to my own left and back a little ways, watching myself sing. It’s the only out-of-body experience I’ve ever had. I remember nothing else about the event, except that I didn’t get the part.
Two years after that audition I went back to the Fulton to work as an apprentice in a summer equity company at $15 a week. We opened four shows in a month and ran them in rep for another month. I sang in the chorus of an Amish musical, ran lights for The Crucible, scrounged props for Tobacco Road, and spent weeks building eighteenth-century hoopskirts and vests for a revival of Royall Tyler’s The Contrast, a comedy about pure-hearted Americans and foppish Brits. Tyler’s play made its debut in 1787—nearly fifty years after real-life colonists put mortar to stone to build what would eventually become the foundations of the Fulton Theatre, and more than twenty years after a group of Indians died inside the confines of those stone walls.
I spent whole days and nights threading plastic stays into muslin corsets and jamming yards of taffeta into bodices no bigger than my neck. Ronni, the costume designer, smoked long, filter-tipped cigarettes and used a ripper to stir powdered cream into the tall cups of coffee she sipped all day long. Several months pregnant, she’d come down from New York for the summer to run the shop with her sister Joanie and a woman named Poof, who cut patterns. We all had what we called theater-gray complexions.
The costume shop stood down the street from the Fulton, in an old warehouse with the words “Mack, the Coffee Man” painted in black letters on its side wall. A pair of picture windows opened at street level onto our chaotic interior, and I often wondered what passersby thought went on inside. We were in a slightly seedy part of town. A private bar stood halfway between the costume shop and the theater, and at night you could see glimmers of fluorescent light behind the bar’s shuttered windows. To this day, when I hear the word “speakeasy” I think of that building. One morning a few years after our summer rep season, a costume designer spotted a shoe sticking out of the garbage skip next to the Mack building and tried to grab it for her shop but found it was attached to a foot. A homeless man had climbed into the dumpster the night before and died.
Things like this might explain why my mother once told me there were two careers she preferred I not pursue: funeral direction and the theater.
Theater was all I wanted to do, even if it meant subsisting on coffee and Tab from the neighborhood diner for days on end in order to get the show up on time, a feat we barely achieved with The Contrast. By 7:30 P.M. on opening night, I was still trying to finish a waistcoat for an actor who was due to go onstage at approximately 8:15. The coat was a deep blue ribbed silk, verging on plum, with huge cuffs and fluttering tails, and the actor was Michael Lewis, the misanthropic son of Sinclair. All summer long, Lewis fils had sat in his tiny dressing room sulking when he wasn’t smoking Tiparillos and complaining about something—the building, the pay, his fellow actors, the rehearsal schedule, us. He bristled if you so much as mentioned his dad, so we’d all learned not to say a word, but we knew who he was. It was right there in his playbill bio: “Mr. Lewis is the son of the late Nobel Prize–winning novelist Sinclair Lewis and the journalist and commentator Dorothy Thompson.” Just what those parents had done to make Michael the ogre he was, we couldn’t imagine. He was in his early forties, tall and stooped, with a long, curving nose that made me think of Captain Hook. He kept mostly to himself. Everyone knew he drank; in rehearsals you could sometimes detect the hazy aftermath of a round with the bottle.
That he was somehow wounded may have occasionally crossed my eighteen-year-old mind, but not that night as I stitched buttons into place and rushed over to the ironing board. Lewis, I knew, had been grumbling all day about our incompetence. He didn’t want to go onstage in a blouse, he wanted the waistcoat, and what in God’s name had we been doing all summer for it to come to this. I remember my frenzy, the uncomfortably pregnant Ronni urging me on, Joanie cheering as I pumped the last shot of steam into the coat and bounded out the door. The two sisters physically pushed me off on a hundred-yard sprint from our shop to the theater, shouting go, go, go. I tore down the street, past the speakeasy and the bums, the silver diner glistening in the dusk, onto the sidewalk and through the back door of the Fulton into the greenroom where Lewis was pacing. The red of his fury bled through his makeup. I threw the coat over his shoulders, yanked his arms through the sleeves, adjusted the front while he fiddled with the lace jabot at his neck, and then he was gone, upstairs and onstage, not a second to spare. I could hear applause through the ceiling, the creaking of the old floorboards as the son of the author of Main Street and Babbitt made his entrance that evening in one of the first American plays ever produced.
Within a year Michael Lewis was dead. Forty-four years old, he left a daughter and two sons, a wife and an ex-wife. The obituaries didn’t give the cause of death, but we could all guess, right or wrong, and anyway it didn’t seem right that someone so mean could survive for long. By then my own life had spun off in untoward directions. I’d quit the Christian theater group I’d joined in high school and taken up with a married set designer who seduced me in my college theater. I thought it a fitting location, given my passions. I look back now and see that I craved drama so desperately I didn’t mind wrecking lives in order to get it.
When I go back to the Fulton today, among the ghosts I find is the specter