This Enemy Town

CHAPTER 4

Over the course of the next week I saw Emma every day, quite literally, in passing. I’d wave cheerily while on my way to or from the set shop in nearby Alumni Hall or we’d exchange pleasantries when I happened to run into her-surrounded by several dozen of her cast mates-in the dressing room.

On Saturday afternoon I paused in the hallway of Mahan, paint bucket in hand, to watch as Emma, dressed like a Victorian bag lady, perfected her timing, a complicated choreography made considerably more difficult by the demands of her bulky costume: a tattered shawl pinned over a tightly laced bodice, a red bonnet sporting a nosegay of wilted pansies, and skirt upon skirt upon layers of petticoats over the most extraordinary pair of hot pink pantaloons Victorian London had ever seen.

The midshipman playing Judge Turpin was stalking the hallways, too, flinging his judicial robes about like a latter day Dracula, dropping to his knees again and again to recite mea culpa, mea culpa, mea maxima culpa for a pivotal but disturbing scene that had been cut-for obvious reasons, it seemed to me-from the original Broadway production. As I watched, fascinated, Turpin clutched a Bible and sang about his obsession for Johanna, his teenage ward, then produced a whip from his sleeve and began flailing himself: God! Deliver me! Filth! Leave me!

All activity in the hallway ground to a halt. Actors, tech crew, and midshipmen simply passing through on their way to athletic practice were sucked into Turpin’s orbit. Eyes closed, accompanied by music nobody else heard, Turpin sang a cappella with unrestrained passion and an intensity that was almost scary. Soft. White. Cool. Virgin. Palms. His final E-flat faded into several seconds of palpable silence, followed by the echoing patter of spontaneous and enthusiastic applause.

Whatever one might think about the propriety of a self-flagellation scene in a college production, one thing was certain-the audience would be mesmerized.

Turpin shook himself out of his trance, adjusted his silver wig-which had slipped crookedly over his left eye-bowed deeply to his impromptu audience, and gave a high five to the midshipman playing Beadle Bamford, who’d been standing nearby with the script open, following along.

“Whoa!” The comment came from a midshipman who was lounging against the wall directly behind me.

“Whoa, indeed,” I agreed, glancing at the young man over my shoulder.

Without his mad scientist disguise, I hardly recognized the kid, but it was definitely Kevin, I decided: tall-at least six-foot-two-with blue eyes, fair freckled skin, and a fuzz of reddish hair cut “high and tight,” like the U.S. Marine his mother told me he aspired to be. “That’ll give some old admiral a coronary,” Kevin chuckled.

“I daresay you’re right.” I eased into a vacant spot next to him and leaned back against the cold stone wall. “And how about that block of tickets reserved for Manresa?” I wondered aloud, referring to the upscale assisted living center, a former Jesuit retreat, built high on the banks of the Severn River, just opposite the Academy.

Kevin jerked his head to the left. “Emma’s bit is going to give the blue hairs apoplexy, too, I’ll bet.”

I followed his gaze. Emma was working on her number, the center of attention once again, now that Judge Turpin had swanned off, cape tails flapping. “‘Hey! Hoy! Sailor boy! Want it snugly harbored?’” She sashayed across the marble floor, flipped up her skirts and aimed a couple of pelvic thrusts-half taunting, half teasing-at the Beadle. “‘Open me gate, but dock it straight, I see it lists to starboard!’” she sang. Then, just as quickly, she switched off the beggar woman and became Emma again, bending at the waist to adjust the laces on her high-buttoned shoes, revealing yards of frothy petticoats.

Quite frankly, I was surprised. Emma had to know that Kevin was watching. And he was, too, a goofy grin splitting his face. What was Emma thinking? Didn’t she know he’d take it as a sign of encouragement? I’d have to speak to that girl. But before I could corner her for a motherly word, Emma had snatched the bonnet off her counterfeit ringlets and scampered down the stairs in the general direction of the dressing rooms.

“’Scuse me, ma’am.” Kevin pushed away from the wall and bounded down the stairs after her. “Emma, wait up!”

“Don’t mind me,” I grumped to his departing back. I fought back the urge to run after the pair. But Emma was a big girl, I told myself. Time she learned to deal with the consequences of her complicated love life without any assistance from me. Besides, I needed to get busy on Mrs. Lovett’s oven.

My project, the oven, was actually well underway and, like every prop in Sweeney Todd, was intended to be oversized, exaggerated in scale, not only so that it’d be more menacing, but for a more practical reason: so it could be seen from every corner of the theater.

The size and shape of your average refrigerator, the oven was built out of quarter-inch plywood. A thin sheet of metal covered the door, which opened with a downward tug on a large iron handle. On top, we’d installed a squat chimney stack. I say “we” because I’d had the assistance of a pro, Midshipman First Class Bennett Small, who had turned up backstage in the tech room one day, tossed two quarters into a can on top of the minifridge, helped himself to a Coke, and cheerfully introduced himself as my assistant.

“Help yourself,” he invited, indicating the fridge. He stretched out full-length on the ratty sofa and propped his feet up on the arm. “Anything that doesn’t have a label on it is fair game.”

I opened the fridge and peered in. Cokes, Diet Cokes, Sprites, a few Gatorades, some with labels and some without, were stacked neatly inside like cordwood. I selected an unlabeled Coca-Cola and, following Midshipman Small’s example, fished a couple of quarters out of my purse and tossed them into the coffee can.

Midshipman Small took a long swig from his soda. “Don’t touch the Dr Pepper, though, or Adam will go ballistic.”

“Adam?” I popped the top on my soda.

“Adam Monroe. The mid playing Beadle Bamford.”

“No chance of that,” I told my assistant. “Can’t stand the stuff. Way too sweet.”

Bennett Small, I soon learned, was called Gadget. The nickname was apt. He could turn nuts and bolts, odd scraps of metal and miscellaneous gizmos from Radio Shack, into inventions as diverse as a receiver that could pick up signals from Voyager One or, in a recent more down-to-earth effort, a high-tech, radio-controlled miniature robot known in collegiate circles as a BattleBot. That fall, he’d entered the competitive BattleBot arena with a lightweight ’Bot he’d named Skeezicks. Skeezicks successfully evaded killer saws, pulverizers, and the dreaded vortex before reaching out its skinny metal arms and short-circuiting its opponent for the well-deserved win.

During the first week of our partnership, Gadget and I reached what I considered a fair and equitable division of labor on oven construction: Gadget ran wires, installed electrical switches and lightbulb sockets. I bought the red lightbulb at Safeway, screwed it in, and-tah-dah-flipped on the switch.

We’d been waiting around all week for the smoke machine to be delivered, and by the time it appeared on the loading dock, we’d become a well-oiled team. I held the tool bag, passing tools to him like an operating room nurse while Gadget unpacked the equipment, secured the smoke machine to the floor just behind the oven, and got the whole thing going.

“You are wasted on the Naval Academy,” I told Gadget as we stood in Row C, arms folded across our chests, admiring our handiwork. The oven crouched on four stubby legs, stage left, belching smoke and glowing crimson, like a malevolent Easy-Bake oven. “You should be working for NASA.”

Gadget blinked pale blue eyes at me from behind his rimless eyeglasses. “I’m going nuke,” he said.

“Submarines?” The news didn’t surprise me. Only midshipmen at the very top of their graduating class were selected for the nuclear Navy. Gadget was so smart he’d probably be the first midshipman in history to graduate with more than a 4.0.

“Yoo-hoo!” It was Dorothy, standing “upstairs” in Sweeney’s tonsorial parlor, shading her eyes against the glare of the stage lights. “I could use a little technical expertise up here!”

Actually, Dorothy had seemed hyperenergized that week, banging away with little help or complaint on the scaffolding above my head-the second floor of Mrs. Lovett’s pie shop. “Get me while you can,” she had chirped down to me on one occasion. “I go back to the oncologist on Tuesday, so by Wednesday, I’ll be back to barfing.”

I could relate to that. I’d once been so ill from my chemotherapy that I’d watched all of Killer Klowns from Outer Space because I was too exhausted to reach across the bed for the remote. So, I took Dorothy at her word. Earlier in the week, we raided the antique shops in West Annapolis, furnishing Sweeney’s chamber with a coat tree, a low bookshelf, a sofa-sized painting in a rococo frame entitled The Barque Geelong Off Hong Kong, and a large wooden chest with brass studs and leather straps, just the thing to hold the body of Perelli, rival barber to Sweeney Todd and Sweeney’s first victim.

For a mere $120 plus tax we’d scored an actual red and white barber pole at Absolutely Fabulous Consignments, then celebrated our coup over luscious, grilled Reuben sandwiches-three napkins required-at Regina’s German deli just next door. We figured we’d earned it.

All the props were in place now at Sweeney’s except the most important-his chair. Rented from a theater company in Virginia, the Victorian-style barber chair had made its appearance on the loading dock about the same time as our smoke machine, and Dorothy, Sweeney, and the two midshipmen in charge of trapdoor and body chute construction were wasting no time getting it installed. Made of solid wood with a seat and back of woven cane, the chair was a veteran, having dispatched hundreds of Sweeney’s victims in theaters all the way from Maine to Florida.

“Guinea pigs!” Dorothy shouted. “I need guinea pigs!” Behind her, Sweeney and one of the tech crew were carefully aligning a short pipe that extended from the bottom of the chair with a metal plate on the floor. “Come on!” she urged when nobody made any effort to step forward. “I need volunteers to go down the chute, otherwise we won’t know where to position the chair.”

Professor Black materialized at my elbow. “Don’t need any cracked heads on my watch,” he muttered.

“Hellooooooo?” Dorothy warbled.

Still nobody stepped up to the plate.

I gently elbowed Professor Black. “What’s the problem?”

“Beats the heck out of me.”

And me, too. Midshipmen maintain themselves in peak physical condition. They are required to run a mile in under six minutes, jump from a forty-foot tower into a tiny pool of water, and leap tall buildings in a single bound, or they don’t graduate. You’d think a trip down a chute the length of your average playground slide would be, well, child’s play.

Professor Black apparently agreed. He began pin-wheeling his arms. “Murphy! Crenshaw! Tyler! Get out here, the lot of you! It’s show time!” Surprisingly spry for a man of his girth, the professor hopped onto the stage, and as each actor straggled in from the wings, began herding them like some tweedy sheepdog into a line that snaked, single file, up the stairway leading to Sweeney’s tonsorial parlor.

Gadget and I watched as the first victim settled himself into Sweeney’s chair, a mix of anticipation and apprehension alternating across his face. The actor playing Sweeney, standing just behind, pantomimed the throat slitting bit and yanked on the back of the chair, causing the seat to shoot forward, depositing his victim feet first through the trapdoor. “Next!” sang Sweeney in a lyrical baritone.

Two more victims were successfully launched through the trapdoor and down the chute. After each, Dorothy and the technician would confer, slightly reposition the chair and adjust the mounting plate accordingly.

By the time everything was screwed down tight, the trials had attracted a handful of daredevils, midshipmen who probably spent their leave time driving their SUVs from theme park to theme park, riding roller coasters with names like Anaconda, Shockwave, and Screamin’ Demon. Queued up rather haphazardly on stage, they jostled for position, waiting for the opportunity to sit down in the chair, have their throats slit, and play dead as the floor gave out beneath them. For these guys, everything, even mealtimes, could turn into a competition, and pretty soon Saturday morning rehearsal had become an Olympic event.

“Eight point seven!” somebody shouted as another victim shot out the end of the chute.

“Nine point three!” said another.

And we all fell about the auditorium laughing.

“Hey, Hannah. How about you?”

I gaped at Dorothy. “Me?” I tapped my chest with my thumb. “You talking to me?”

Dorothy waved me onstage. “You said you wanted to give it a try.”

“I don’t remember saying that.” I smiled uncertainly, watching as Sweeney skillfully dispatched another victim. He was practicing with his razors now, big scary metal objects with seven-inch blades that had been modeled on a traditional straight razor and fabricated out of a single piece of steel by a local company that usually manufactured hard-to-find parts for boats. There was no edge, of course, and therefore absolutely no danger of Sweeney cutting anyone’s throat for real, but from the audience, the razors looked menacing. Between victims, Sweeney twirled the razors, and the metal flashed between his fingers, filling the darkened theater with twinkling shafts of light.

I swallowed hard, considered the chair and the razors, thinking how embarrassed my family would be if my obituary read, “Killed in a bizarre accident involving a barber chair.”

“Hannah?”

Some cheeky mid behind me began making discreet clucking noises.

“Oh, all right!” Holding onto the rickety wooden railing for dear life, I climbed the steps to Sweeney’s shop, where the pseudobarber welcomed me into his chair with a polite bow. The Pair-o-Docs, Professors Black and Tracey, clapped encouragingly from the wings. Dorothy bounced up and down on her toes. I imagined everyone else was holding their breaths.

Keeping one cautious eye on Sweeney, I backed into the chair, squirmed a bit and took a deep breath myself.

Slice’a da throat, light-a da light, shriek-a da whistle. My head shot back, the ground opened up beneath me, and I was completely at the mercy of gravity. Yee-haw! One second later I lay in an untidy heap on a wrestling mat inside Mrs. Lovett’s pie shop, laughing my head off.

Gadget extended a hand, helping me to my feet. “Bravo zulu,” he said. Navy speak for well done.

“Thanks.” I brushed sawdust off my sweat pants. “That’s almost as exciting as the Volcano Pool at the Polynesian Village Resort.”

“Disney World?” he asked.

I nodded. “We took the grandkids down last summer. You climb to the top of this fiberglass mountain, then shoot down a long slide built inside it-whoosh!-into the pool.”

Gadget and I headed for the tech room at stage right, down a short flight of steps and into a weirdly shaped cubbyhole of a room furnished with an odd assortment of castoff furniture, its walls densely painted with the names of cast members who had appeared in Academy productions going well back to the 1930s. A computer, a television, a VCR, piles of cheap paperback novels and videotapes-I saw Mulan, Rambo, Shakespeare in Love, and Animal House-a gooseneck lamp and loose wires and extension cords leading God knows where. All the comforts of home.

“We spent a fortune on Magic Kingdom tickets,” I said as Gadget held open the door and waited for me to go through ahead of him. “But forget about Mickey! I think the kids would have been happy to spend the whole four days at the pool, sluicing down that lava tube.”

I helped myself to an oatmeal cookie from a package sitting open on the table. “I did it a couple of times,” I added, taking a bite. “Damn thing was over thirty feet long, twisting and turning.” I gestured upward with the cookie in the general direction of the stage. “Much more dangerous than that, anyway.”

Gadget rapped three times on the battered tabletop. “Knock on wood.”

“You think that’s necessary?”

Gadget shrugged. “You never know. We put it together pretty fast.”

I finished off the cookie and licked the crumbs off my fingers. “I’m not worried. This is an engineering school, isn’t it? You’re engineers. You’re supposed to be able to build things.” I grinned back at him, then, thinking about the rickety handrail, rapped three times on the tabletop, too.

As my mother always said, “Better safe than sorry.”