Dead Man Dancing Read online

  Hutch shot me a withering, sleep-deprived look, and I raised an apologetic hand. ‘Sorry. Once a mother, always a mother.’

  Melanie smiled sweetly. ‘I’m wearing so many layers I can barely walk.’

  ‘OK, then,’ Hutch said, consulting his notes. ‘We’re taking Melanie’s car. Paul, tomorrow morning you’re taking Ruth, Chloe, Hannah and Hannah’s friend Eva, and driving my car.’

  ‘Why not use my car?’ Paul asked.

  ‘Because I’m an Inner Circle subscriber, so I’ve got a prepaid parking pass for the Hippodrome Atrium Garage.’ He tapped a map I’d printed out from the Shall We Dance? website. ‘You go in here, on Eutaw Street.’ He looked up. ‘It’ll be easier to navigate to the theater from there with Ruth in her wheelchair.’

  ‘Agreed. But where will you park?’

  ‘In one of the Inner Harbor hotel garages.’ Hutch flapped a hand. ‘Don’t worry about us.’

  He patted the breast pocket of his sports jacket, stuck his hand inside and pulled out a small, yellow envelope. ‘Here are your tickets.’ He opened the envelope and dealt out each of the tickets like playing cards. ‘You’re supposed to enter on Baltimore Street, that’s the south side of the theater near the ticket office. Even with tickets, I’d advise you to arrive early so you’ll get the best seats.’

  ‘Where will you and Melanie be?’ Ruth asked.

  ‘According to Jay, contestants are required to line up out front, under the marquee. It’ll be clearly marked.’

  ‘It’s going to be so C-O-L-D!’ Melanie rubbed her hands together rapidly. ‘I hope Jay and Kay don’t have to stand outside very long. He’s been feeling achy lately. Thinks he may be coming down with the flu.’

  Paul raised an eyebrow. ‘Are the Giannottis competing?’

  ‘Not exactly. One of the producers thought it’d be a brilliant idea to have dance exhibitions during the taping breaks. So they’ve tapped a few of the local professionals for the honor. Jay and Kay are brushing up the paso doble they took to the Internationals last year. I was there,’ continued Melanie. ‘They are amazing!’

  I cringed as Hutch tipped my grandmother’s antique walnut dining-room chair back on its two hind legs. ‘I think it would be easier to plan a military invasion of a Third World country.’ He ran a hand through his thinning hair. ‘Sometimes I wonder why the hell I’m doing this.’

  Ruth laid a hand on his arm. ‘Because you could have in college, but didn’t. Now there will be no regrets.’ Using both hands, she wheeled her chair back a few inches from the table, angling it slightly to face me. ‘I’ll always regret I stayed home that Easter instead of coming over to visit you in France, Hannah.’ She laughed bitterly. ‘I missed La Sorbonne, can you imagine? In Paris! But what did I know? I thought I’d die if I couldn’t spend that vacation break with Eric. What a mistake that turned out to be!’ Tears welled in her eyes.

  Hutch picked up Ruth’s hand, brought it to his lips and held it there. ‘I love you, Ruth.’

  At that, Ruth began to cry in earnest, tears trickling down both cheeks, leaving dark spots on her pink cashmere sweater. She banged on her cast with her fist. ‘Oh, hell! With this stupid cast on my leg I can’t even be a drama queen and race out of the room in tears!’

  At that point, everyone started to cackle, even Ruth.

  When he got himself under control, Hutch stood up, clasped his hands together. ‘Is everyone clear?’ When we all nodded, he said, ‘Ready, Melanie?’

  ‘As I’ll ever be.’

  ‘Costumes?’

  ‘Already in the car.’

  Hutch took a deep breath and let it out slowly. ‘Well, that’s it, then. Wish us luck.’

  Ruth, who had been dabbing at the corners of her eyes with a paper napkin, looked up. ‘Break a leg!’ Then erupted in a fresh episode of giggling.

  Hutch leaned over, put a hand behind her head, and kissed his fiancé firmly on the mouth. ‘There! That should shut you up, you silly girl.’

  As we stood on the stoop and watched Hutch and Melanie drive away, I said to Paul. ‘How are they going to dance without any sleep?’

  Paul’s arm snaked around my shoulder. ‘Probably the same way you aced that paper on Stendhal.’

  ‘How’s that?’ His face looked ghostly in the light from the porch light.

  He pulled me close, his chin resting lightly on top of my head. ‘Adrenalin.’

  Eighteen

  The Hippodrome – officially the France-Merrick Performing Arts Center – was a lovingly restored 1914 vaudeville theater and movie palace, the centerpiece of Baltimore’s west side renaissance. Occupying an entire city block on Eutaw between Baltimore and Fayette Streets, the Hipp, as the locals called it, bordered on the Inner Harbor just four blocks north of Camden Yards where the Orioles had just played another losing season.

  In restoring the Baltimore landmark, the developers had linked it to two adjacent nineteenth-century bank buildings. Now spacious lobbies, lounges and restaurants afforded impressive views of the city including, to the south, Baltimore’s historic Bromo Seltzer tower modeled on the Palazzo Vecchio in Florence, Italy. Twelve letters advertising the famous antacid circled the clock’s face rather than numbers. When we joined the line, tickets in hand, the face of the clock read ‘L’ o’clock exactly.

  I’d seen Prairie Home Companion at the Hippodrome the previous October, and been dazzled by the facility. Bathed in soft golds, browns and beiges, the interior spaces of the theater glowed; each fresco, cartouche and medallion – flowers, corn husks, gryphons – had been so painstakingly restored that it was impossible to tell where the old ended and the new began. I was looking forward to seeing it again.

  For half an hour our little party shivered outside the theater, watching as the line snaked out behind us, growing steadily by groups of four, six, ten until by seven thirty it extended all the way down Baltimore Street and disappeared around the corner of Paca. I remembered reading that the Hippodrome could seat 2,220; the line could reach all the way down to the Inner Harbor by now.

  After a bit, a pair of bruisers dressed in chinos, muscles challenging the seams of their neon green T-shirts bearing the stylized Shall We Dance? SWD logo, moved down the line inspecting tickets.

  When asked, Chloe presented her ticket solemnly. For the most part, my granddaughter waited patiently, sucking periodically on a straw stuck into a bottle of strawberry Yoo-Hoo. ‘I wish I could sit in your wheelchair, Aunt Ruth,’ she said after the guard moved away.

  ‘Don’t be silly, Chloe, you’ll squish your aunt’s sore leg.’

  ‘Are they going to let us in soon?’ she wondered.

  ‘I certainly hope so.’

  ‘I have to go to the bathroom.’

  ‘It shouldn’t be long now.’ I could have used a chair or the bathroom myself, but the previous evening Hutch and Melanie had appropriated our camp stools. When we arrived at seven, we’d spied the pair hunkered down under the marquee with all the other shivering hopefuls. Over their heads, draped from one end of the marquee to the other was an enormous banner: Baltimore Welcomes Shall We Dance 2008! We’d given our team a thumb’s up sign before hurrying around the corner to take our places in the audience line.

  At seven forty-five, leaving Chloe in Eva’s care, I decided to bop out front and check up on Hutch and Melanie.

  I found Hutch dozing, his head leaning at an impossible, and most certainly uncomfortable angle against the wall. In contrast, Melanie seemed bright as a sparrow. ‘We’re fine, Hannah,’ Melanie chirped when I asked. She extended her right arm, pulled up the sleeve of her parka. Circling her wrist was a white plastic wristband like the kind you get when they admit you to the hospital. Instead of name, date of birth, doctor’s name and blood type, though, Melanie’s wristband said ‘22’. ‘Hutch is number twenty-one,’ she told me, her face flushed with excitement. ‘We could be in the first round!’

  Curious about who had snagged spots one through twenty, I glanced up the line. Dancers one a
nd two were no more than eighteen years old, sporting faux-hawk hairdos and dressed in baggy, saggy hip hop clothing. They guarded their number one slot at the plastic door of an elegant white tent with Palladian-style windows, the kind of tent one rents for wedding receptions and bar mitzvahs. Through the windows, rippled by the plastic, I could see other individuals working in their neon green shirtsleeves. Portable heaters in there, I bet. Lucky dogs.

  Further down the line couples waited, some in costumes, some in street clothes, some in outfits so strange it could have gone either way. ‘Are they going to let you change?’ I asked Melanie, thinking of all the time and expense that would go down the drain if they couldn’t wear their costumes.

  ‘We’ll have the use of dressing rooms, don’t worry.’ She flapped her arms like a scarecrow and laughed. ‘Can you see me dancing a tango in this outfit? The Sta-Puf marshmallow girl meets the Michelin Man.’

  I laughed at the image, too. ‘Can I get you guys something to eat?’

  ‘No thanks. After they gave us the wristbands and collected our forms, they said only one of us had to be in line at all times. So, when the sun came up, Hutch hiked up to Lexington Market – I was absolutely drooling for a Pollock Johnny’s hot dog, all the way, you know, with chili, mustard and that secret stuff they put on it, but, darn it, the market doesn’t open until eight thirty. So I ate some of the chips we brought along.’

  She delivered this information in one long, breathless sentence. I felt exhausted just listening. It reminded me of the difference in our ages. Melanie was younger than my daughter, Emily. She probably even knew the names of Brittany Spears’s babies.

  My cell phone abruptly launched into ‘Anchors Aweigh’.

  Paul. ‘Where are you, Hannah? They’re about to open the doors.’

  ‘Hold on, I’m coming!’ I gave Melanie a hug, waggled my fingers in the direction of the still napping Hutch, and sprinted to rejoin my family.

  By the time I got around the corner, green-shirted SWD staff had already opened the box-office doors and admitted the first group of ten audience members, counting heads as each person went in. When it was our group’s turn, Eva pushed Ruth, and I held Chloe’s hand, with Paul bringing up the rear.

  Inside the lobby, adjacent to The Hipp Café (closed, alas, the muffaletta panini is to die for) the organizers had set up a sophisticated security screening station, like at the airport. Before we could enter the theater, we had to pass through a metal detector, beyond which I could see other uniformed staff seated at long tables pawing through audience members’ bags. ‘Are we flying Southwest to Dallas, or coming to see a television show?’ I muttered to Paul as he joined me on the other side of the detector.

  While a guard searched her wheelchair for explosive devices and her crutches for switchblade knives, Ruth hopped one-footed through the metal detector. Paul reached out for Ruth’s hand, tucked it under his arm to lend support. ‘Count your blessings, Hannah. If the doctors had needed to put pins in Ruth’s leg, we might never have gotten to see the show.’

  ‘Ha ha,’ Ruth said. She turned to the guard who had just given the seal of approval to her crutches. ‘Look, I can’t bear messing with that blasted wheelchair in the auditorium. I’m just fine with these,’ she said, adjusting the crutches under her arms. ‘Can you stow the chair someplace until the show is over?’

  The guard pressed a button on his walkie-talkie, and a green-shirted staffer arrived almost at once to give Ruth a receipt and take charge of the wheelchair.

  We turned over our bags for inspection – even Angelina Ballerina – and after they had been blessed, we were moved along like cattle to a section of the lobby that had been cordoned off with velvet ropes. Once some sort of critical mass was reached – Twenty-five? Thirty? – another SWD staffer unhooked a rope, gave us a come-along sign, and escorted our group into the theater.

  ‘Oh, wow!’ exclaimed Eva as we traipsed single-file down the aisle behind the staffer. Like me, Eva must have been stunned by the lavish, art deco beauty of the place. Balconies with curtained box seats were stacked to our right and to our left. Behind and above us rose an ornate, multi-layered balcony.

  ‘I’m glad we came early,’ Eva said as we filed into a row of old-fashioned, red velvet seats. ‘If I’d been in charge of the scheduling, we’d be back in row FF instead of up front in row K.’

  Ruth settled into a seat at row’s end, her cast extending into the aisle like a turnstile. ‘Look at this,’ she said as she adjusted her leg. ‘The seat ends are wrought iron. What do they remind you of, Hannah?’

  I leaned over for a closer look and smiled. It didn’t take much imagination to see what Ruth saw. ‘The legs on Grandmother’s old Singer sewing machine!’

  Paul sat next to Ruth, then came Eva, Chloe and me. ‘Grandma, we have to move!’ cried Chloe just as we were shrugging out of our coats and settling in. ‘This seat already belongs to somebody. See?’ She rubbed a chubby index finger back and forth over a brass plaque attached to the wooden armrest.

  ‘We don’t have to move, Pumpkin. That’s the name of somebody who donated money to adopt your chair.’

  ‘My chair is adopted?’

  ‘Uh huh.’

  ‘That’s silly.’

  ‘Do you have your notebook?’ I asked, trying to distract my granddaughter from what was likely to be a discussion of every adopted child among her classmates and every pet we’d ever adopted from the SPCA. We’d taken Chloe out of school for the day on the condition she write a report on her experience. ‘Look up, Chloe,’ I said, and pointed toward the stage. ‘Way, way, up.’

  Above the stage was a classical mural – goddesses, muses and nymphs cavorting, or at the very least lounging about an Italian walled garden. The central figure bore a striking resemblance to Jackie O, if the former first lady had gone in for diaphanous robes rather than Oleg Cassini. ‘Write a story about that picture,’ I suggested.

  ‘OK.’ Chloe hauled out her notebook and a pencil and set to work.

  The section of seats immediately in front of us nearest the stage seemed to have been reserved, and now I saw why. A boom camera sailed back and forth over the first several rows, like a grazing Brontosaurus. On the other side of the stage in front of the proscenium arch, a black-clad Steadicam operator appeared to be testing his equipment.

  More quickly than I would have thought possible considering the security measures in place, the rows behind us became occupied. Soon, people began filling the balcony, too. The noise level steadily increased. The rustling of paper, the shedding of coats, the scuffling of shoes, the crackling of candy wrappers. Kids talking, parents hushing. Shouts of greeting. Coughing, sneezing. Even people breathing, multiplied by two thousand, contributed to the noise.

  Just when I thought I’d be called upon to take Chloe to the restroom again, more for entertainment’s sake than out of necessity, a man bounded down the aisle and up a short flight of steps to the stage, his green shirt bright as a traffic light as he paced in front of the Hippodrome’s purple, gold-fringed curtain.

  Some guys should never wear jeans, and this fellow was one of them. He was dressed in the same green SWD T-shirt as the rest of the crew, but he’d tucked it into his jeans and cinched it in with a belt riding several miles south of wherever a normal waistline might be. Clapped to his head was a serious pair of headphones with a wireless microphone attached to one side on a flexible stalk.

  ‘Who is that guy?’ Paul asked.

  I shrugged. ‘Some sort of technician?’

  ‘Ladies and gentlemen, good morning!’

  A few scattered ‘good mornings’ drifted stage-ward from the audience, including an enthusiastic one from Chloe, who had been well trained by Mrs Gottschalk, her third grade teacher.

  On the stage, the guy cupped a hand over one ear. ‘I can’t hear you! Let’s make some noise back there!’

  ‘Good morning!’ the audience roared.

  ‘That’s much better.’ He took several steps forward. �
�Welcome to our first casting call for Shall We Dance?’ He raised both arms over his head and clapped his hands, which we took as a sign that we should do the same.

  So we did.

  As the applause died down, the guy continued, ‘My name is Dave Carson, and I’m the stage director for this production. I’m the boss. I tell everybody what to do. I tell you what to do.’ Up went the arms, and everyone clapped like crazy. Meanwhile, his T-shirt crept out from under his belt, revealing three inches of white, very hairy belly.

  Dramatically shielding her eyes, Ruth said, ‘Tell me they’re not going to put that on TV.’

  ‘Vomit girl was.’

  ‘Oh, right. I forgot. This is family television.’

  ‘Do you mind?’ hissed the woman on my right.

  Dave Carson apparently didn’t notice any cool breeze caressing his midsection, so he forged on. ‘A funny thing happened on my way to Baltimore today.’

  Paul moaned. ‘Lord, he thinks he’s a comedian, too.’

  ‘Shhhh.’ The woman on my right was annoyed again.

  ‘I walked into a bar down on Howard Street, and I sat next to this guy with a dog lying at his feet. And I said to the guy, Does your dog bite? . . .’

  ‘Oh, no, not a bar joke.’ I reached over and put my hands over Chloe’s ears.

  ‘Grandma, I know this joke,’ Chloe whispered.

  Thinking kids are growing up too darn fast these days, I removed my hands from her ears. ‘You do?’

  ‘Uh huh. It’s not his dog.’

  Up on the stage Dave said, ‘I thought you said your dog didn’t bite! And the guy says, Hey, it ain’t my dog.’

  ‘See?’ Chloe scoffed as all around us the audience erupted in laughter. I should have put a hand over Chloe’s mouth instead of her ears.

  Encouraged, Dave pulled out another one. ‘Say, did you hear the one about the circus owner who walked into a bar?’ He paused, waiting for a response.

  ‘No!’ shouted someone directly behind me.

  ‘Tell us, Dave!’ somebody else yelled from the balcony.

  Dave shuffled his feet in an aw-shucks sort of way, then forged on with an old chestnut about a tap-dancing duck. I zoned out and watched Jackie O take shape under Chloe’s pencil, looking a little like Minnie Mouse, but without the ears.