This Enemy Town (5 page)

“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.”

Victorian London: it surrounded me. Gentlemen
in top hats. Ladies in bustles and bonnets and bows. Butchers and bakers and candlestick makers. Beggars, grave diggers, Gypsies, the odd escapee from Bedlam, and a stick-twirling bobby or two. I'd been teleported—T-shirt, paint-smeared blue jeans, Nikes, and all—directly into a set for Charles Dickens's
Christmas Carol
. When I closed my eyes, I could even
smell
the nineteenth century—but when I opened them again, it was only a half-eaten steak sub with onions that an actor had abandoned on a nearby chair.

The theater was filled with sound, too, a glorious cacophony as the orchestra members wandered into the pit, unpacked their instruments, and began tuning up. They were accompanied by saws, drills, and hammers, musical themselves in their whines, drones, and rat-a-tat-tats as, working frantically together, we neared the firm deadline imposed by opening night.

I'd finished painting the steps leading up to Sweeney's parlor, cleaned my brushes in turpentine, and took a well-deserved time-out to watch with some amusement as Gadget helped the sound engineers fit the leads with body mikes. He'd lined the mikes up along the edge of the stage, marked each one with an actor's name using masking tape, and was checking their batteries—the square,
nine-volt kind—for juice. Gadget being Gadget, he'd chosen the high-tech way, by pressing his tongue against both terminals.

My cell phone vibrated against my ribs. It was Dorothy, leaving a message that she wanted to consult with me about something. Not seeing anything productive in watching Gadget systematically destroy his taste buds, I returned her call. She didn't pick up, so I went looking for her.

Dorothy wasn't taking a break in the tech room as her message had indicated, so I hustled off in the opposite direction, through a narrow, almost invisible doorway and down an even narrower flight of stairs. I paused on the half landing that opened into the other hidey-hole where actors and amorous, in-the-know couples seeking privacy often hung out: the Jabberwocky room. Painted flat black, the walls of the Jabberwocky room were decorated with large-scale, surprisingly faithful copies of Tenniel's illustrations from
Alice in Wonderland.
Alice had been swimming up the stairway wall with the Dormouse ever since the 1940s, and on the far wall, behind a rickety bookshelf, she had spent decades sipping endless cups of tea with the Mad Hatter et al. Alas, there was no sign of the Jabberwocky, who at some time beyond recent memory had been painted over with an enormous map of Tolkien's Middle Earth by someone with little skill and even less taste. Because of her recent chemotherapy treatment, I had suspected that Dorothy might be resting on the large white sofa that dominated the room, but she wasn't there.

I toddled down the remaining steps that took me to the lower dressing room level and stuck my head through the door. “Hello? Anybody home?”

I was talking to myself. Everyone appeared to be somewhere else, except for a chorus line of Styrofoam heads that stared at me eyelessly from a shelf. The heads were wig stands, but at that moment they simply sat there on
their necks, eerily; wigless and bald, reminding me, sadly, of Dorothy. The last time I'd seen her, she was still wearing that moth-eaten wig. Maybe she hated the hats I brought her? Plan B was to lure Dorothy and that wig of hers down to Karen James's beauty salon on Maryland Avenue. If anyone could coax it into a more updated hair-style, Karen James could.

Wondering if Karen's place had an emergency entrance, I turned my back on the wig stands and wandered into the dressing room proper. Mirrors covered the walls on both sides, and makeup, book bags, and assorted articles of clothing were strewn about everywhere. Mounted on the wall next to a pair of gigantic pipes at the far end of the room was a strange, dark gray box, which on closer examination appeared to be a radio. I flipped the switch on and nearly jumped out of my Nikes.

“Tobias! Don't talk to me, talk to the audience!”

I spun around, but Professor Black wasn't anywhere in the vicinity. When I could breathe again, I realized that the box had to be an intercom piping sound in directly from the stage some twenty feet overhead. “Plot, plot, plot!” the director shouted above the strident scrape of student violins not yet ready for prime time and the relentless pounding of the electric piano. “If they can't understand the words, they won't know what's going on! Talk to the people in the back row!”

Grinning to myself, and feeling a bit sorry for the actor playing Tobias, I continued into the hallway, past the rooms that housed the Academy's telephone switchboard—always locked up like Fort Knox, for some reason known only to AT&T and the head of building and grounds—and out the back door onto the lawn. I was heading toward the set shop in Alumni Hall. Unless Dorothy had gone home sick, I couldn't imagine where else she could be.

The enormous cargo door in the back of Alumni Hall yawned open, thank goodness, so I didn't have to walk all the way around the building and let myself in the front. I
passed through its jaws into the belly of Alumni Hall, where the staff seemed to be getting ready for a basketball game.

Completed in 1991 with hefty contributions from the United States Congress and individual contributions from well-heeled alumni and friends, the massive arena could seat the entire brigade of midshipmen, plus staff and faculty, too, for a total of 5,700 souls. Got half a million bucks? You, too, could have part of the building named after you, like the USO, which bankrolled the colossal stage that descended from the rafters five or six times a year, transforming the east end of the building into the Bob Hope Performing Arts Center.

Room 1061, the set shop, was open, its door rolled up, accordion style, like an old-fashioned rolltop desk. The concrete floor was spattered with paint in a rainbow of colors, and the frigid air was filled with the delicious, piney smell of freshly sawed wood.

I found Dorothy there, on her hands and knees, looking fairly chipper, considering, and painting pink and white stripes below the chair rail of a flat that would soon be installed as one wall of Mrs. Lovett's parlor. The wall above the chair rail was decorated with wallpaper, a whimsy of hearts and roses.

“Hey,” I said.

On the far side of the cavernous room two midshipmen, a man and a woman dressed in sweats, looked up from their work and waved. They were putting the finishing touches on a backdrop, a stylized black and white representation of the rooftops of London.

Dorothy sat back on her heels and wagged a paintbrush at me, dripping pink paint onto one of her neatly executed white stripes. “There you are! Oh, damn.” She dabbed at the drips with a rag that she kept tucked into the waistband of her jeans. “There's gloves over there,” she said, wiggling the fingers on her free hand in the direction of the workbench. “In case you don't want to ruin your manicure.”

Not having a manicure that I could ruin, I passed on the gloves. I was pleased to see that Dorothy was wearing both a big smile and one of the ball caps I had given her. Wisps of blond hair peeked out, more or less at random, from under the brim. Big gold hoop earrings bounced gently against her neck.

“Great hat,” I said.

She reached up and patted it with a gloved hand. “I thought the crab went well with my ensemble.”

The crab, embroidered on blue denim in tomato-colored thread, exactly matched the red T-shirt Dorothy wore under her cardigan. “
Excellent
choice,” I commented.

Dorothy went back to her stripes while I looked around for a place to stash my my handbag. “What did you want to talk to me about, Dorothy?” I asked, unzipping my jacket a few inches but leaving it on for warmth.

Dorothy looked up from her painting, took a deep breath as if to say something, then shook her head. “Nothing, really. I was just starting to panic about the signs.”

I knew precisely which signs she meant. “Not to worry.” I tried to sound more self-assured than I felt. “I think I can finish them by tomorrow.” Using a screwdriver, I pried the top off a can of black paint, snatched a dry brush from the workbench, and began painting the bold letters that spelled
FRESH HOT PIES
on a rectangular board with several screw eyes installed across the top.

While the letters were drying, I went looking for the jars of tempera I planned to use for the sign's only decoration: a pie. Not much of an artist, I'd downloaded a clip art picture of a pie to my computer, enlarged it, printed it out. Using a pencil, I copied the design, inch by painful inch, to Mrs. Lovett's sign. Then I got my colors together and filled in my outlines with them. That done, I opened a jar of gray and added a twist of steam coming out the hole in the top of the pie. I stepped back to admire my handiwork. “Voilà! What do you think?”

Holding one paintbrush in her teeth and the other in her
hand, Dorothy strolled over to check it out. “Thass goot,” she mumbled around the paintbrush. She removed the paintbrush and grinned. “Thanks. That looks absolutely super.”

I wasn't so sure about the super, but it would certainly do, especially from the vantage point of three rows back. “Guess I better attack the banner now.”

The banner I was referring to was the one used by Pirelli to hawk his elixir. I'd frame the edges of the banner with gold curlicues, I thought, and in ornate script, neatly centered, I'd paint in crimson edged with gold:

 

Signor Adolfo Pirelli
haircutter-barber-toothpuller
to his royal majesty
the king of Naples

 

And under that, in big, bold black:

 

Banish baldness
with
Pirelli's miracle elixir!

 

Since Pirelli was supposedly Eye-talian, I'd decided on a fancy script, appropriately called Informal Roman. I was shameless: I used a package of stencils I found at Michael's crafts store.

I'd painted as far as “the king of Naples,” trying to decide if “king” should begin with a capital or a small K when a bell rang and the two midshipmen who had been working on the backdrop plopped their brushes into jars of paint thinner and hurried away. Dorothy and I were alone, and the silence lengthened between us.

Finally, Dorothy spoke up.

“Hannah?”

“Hmmm?” I'd given the king a small
k
and was working on a capital
N
that would have made a medieval monk proud, so I didn't even bother to look up.

“Hannah?” she said again.

I turned to see that Dorothy had finished with the parlor flat, stripped off her rubber gloves, and was sitting on the concrete floor with her back resting against the wall.

“Can I ask you something?”

“Sure.”

“Did your husband …?” she began, her voice echoing hollowly in the cavernous room. She folded her hands as if she were praying, then pressed them tightly against her lips.

I waited, knowing something important was coming and not wanting to rush her.

“I feel ugly as sin,” she announced. She grabbed the crab cap by the bill and lifted it off her head. “Look!”

The wisps of hair I had noticed earlier were about the extent of it. Except for a line of peachlike fuzz along her forehead, Dorothy was bald. Before I could say anything, she clapped the cap back on, quickly covering her baldness. “Gross, huh?”

“We've all been there,” I said reassuringly. “You hair will grow back. Trust me!”

But Dorothy refused to be reassured. She sat on the concrete, stone-faced, her feet tucked up under her. “After your surgery,” she said after nearly a minute had ticked by, “did your husband lose interest in you?”

I knew where Dorothy was going with that question and decided to make it easier for her.

“Sexually, you mean?”

“Uh-huh.”

I balanced my paintbrush on the rim of the open paint jar and crossed the room to sit next to her. Even though we were the only two people in the set shop, I didn't feel comfortable shouting across the room about my sex life. “Ac
tually, Paul couldn't have been more loving and supportive,” I told her after I'd gotten settled. “It was me who pushed him away.”

Dorothy turned to me in surprise. “Why on earth would you do that?”

I shrugged. “I took it into my head that since I was damaged goods, Paul was only being nice to me out of pity.”

A tear rolled down Dorothy's cheek, and she quickly brushed it away. “Pity? I'll take pity, but Ted shows absolutely no interest in me whatsoever.”

I reached across and took her hand. “Sometimes post-surgery, men are at a loss about what to do. Ted might be afraid he's going to hurt you, for instance.”

It had always amazed me how many support groups there were for cancer survivors, but I could probably count on the fingers of one hand the support groups that were available for their families—their husbands and children.

Dorothy shook her head sadly. “Ted doesn't even try. He spends hours and hours at the office. And when he gets home, he says he's too tired.”

“But he's an admiral at the Pentagon! Didn't you tell me he deals with supplies and matériel? There's a war on in Iraq, Dorothy. Surely it's not so hard to believe that he has to spend a lot of time at the office.”

Dorothy snorted. “Well, if he
is
at his office, he sure as hell doesn't answer his damn telephone.”

“Maybe he's somewhere else?” I offered helpfully. “Like at a meeting?”

She shook her head emphatically. “That's what cell phones are for, right? No, this has been going on for some time now. Long before my surgery. Frankly, Hannah, I think Ted is having an affair.” She looked at me with her sad clown face: circles of color reddened her cheeks, mascara bled into her smudgy blue eyeliner.

She rose up on one hip and dug into the pocket of her
jeans with two fingers. When she found what she was looking for, she held it out to me. “I found this in his toiletry kit, the one he takes with him on business.”