The Catch Trap
Marion Zimmer Bradley
CONTENTS
CONTENTS
DISCLAIMER
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
THE FLYING SANTELLIS
BOOK ONE - The Flyer (1944-1947)
CHAPTER 1
CHAPTER 2
CHAPTER 3
CHAPTER 4
CHAPTER 5
CHAPTER 6
CHAPTER 7
CHAPTER 8
CHAPTER 9
CHAPTER 10
CHAPTER 11
CHAPTER 12
CHAPTER 13
CHAPTER 14
CHAPTER 15
CHAPTER 16
CHAPTER 17
CHAPTER 18
CHAPTER 19
CHAPTER 20
CHAPTER 21
CHAPTER 22
CHAPTER 23
CHAPTER 24
CHAPTER 25
CHAPTER 26
CHAPTER 27
INTERMISSION (1947-1952)
CHAPTER 1
CHAPTER 2
BOOK THREE - The Catcher (1952-1953)
CHAPTER 1
CHAPTER 2
CHAPTER 3
CHAPTER 4
CHAPTER 5
CHAPTER 6
CHAPTER 7
CHAPTER 8
CHAPTER 9
CHAPTER 10
CHAPTER 11
CHAPTER 12
CHAPTER 13
CHAPTER 14
CHAPTER 15
CHAPTER 16
CHAPTER 17
COPYRIGHT
DISCLAIMER
Usual Disclaimer—with a Difference
The Catch Trap is a work of fiction. No character in these pages represents or is intended to represent any actual human being, living or dead. Nor has any circus or carnival mentioned in these pages any existence outside the imagination of the author.
Every novelist says this. It is usually true. However, because I was writing of events which were real, even though my characters had no part in them, I must make a very special disclaimer.
It was no part of my intention to write a fictional history of the American circus. Although my characters are preoccupied with the history and traditions of the flying trapeze, and especially of its great trick, the “triple,” I have not used the real history of the triple for this book.
Although nowadays it is not unusual to see the triple performed by any flyer with a claim to special competence, it was not always so. For a great many years, the triple was believed to be a physical impossibility; and even after it was known to be possible, it was actually known as the salto mortale, or fatal leap, because so many flyers had been killed or injured in attempting it. Like all aficionados of the flying trapeze, I know that it was Ernie Clarke, shortly before World War I, who first accomplished it; that it was the great Alfredo Codona who first managed to put it into his act on a regular basis; that Antoinette Concello was the first woman to do a triple and the only one to perform it in the ring with anything like regularity; and that the great tradition was carried on by such flyers as Fay Alexander and Tito Gaona.
This put me in a curious position. I could, as some novelists have chosen to do, mingle the names of my imaginary characters with real ones, the genuine historical aerialists of the period; but this was a liberty I did not feel free to take. Or I could, alternatively, invent an entire imaginary history for the circus and the art of the flying trapeze, thus of necessity borrowing the accomplishments of real people and their known exploits, and attributing them to my imaginary performers. I have chosen to do this, as better suited to a novelist’s freedom, but this places me under the necessity of making this very special disclaimer.
The private lives of the characters in this book, of the Flying Santellis, the Fortunatis, and the other performers in the imaginary circuses depicted here, do not represent and are not in any way intended to represent the private lives of the well-known circus artistes who actually performed these tricks in the circus rings of the real world. About the private lives of these real-world performers, I know nothing except what, in the words of the immortal Will Rogers, I read in the papers—or what they have chosen to make public in their memoirs. And while this may be as much fiction as my novel, it is a different fiction, and another story.
Where I have borrowed a well-known episode in circus history and attributed it to one of my fictional aerialists, I have done so merely for dramatic effect, and not with the intention of attempting to draw any parallel between the character in my novel and any actual circus performer who ever lived. If some of these episodes never had any existence outside newspaper publicity, or were invented by some imaginative public-relations writer, my only excuse for borrowing them is the novelist’s time-honored excuse: “If it didn’t happen that way, it should have.” Or, to rephrase, Se non e vero, e ben trovato—which means in plain English, It may not be true, but it makes a good yarn.
This book is set in the forties and early fifties. Certain statements made by the characters portray social and sexual attitudes that would be distasteful if not unthinkable today. The reader is earnestly exhorted not to confuse the attitudes expressed by the various characters in the novel with any real-life attitude held by the author.
—Marion Zimmer Bradley
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
To all my friends who, knowing of my obsession with the art of the flying trapeze, have over the years sent me newspaper clippings, photographs, circus programs, circus magazines, and postcards alerting me to books, movies, or TV documentaries which I might otherwise have missed—
To the circus collection is San Antonio, Texas, for allowing me special access to the file on Alfredo Codona—
To the friends who have gone above and beyond the call of duty by accompanying me to the dozenth, or two-dozenth, showing of a movie so that I might study, again and again, the fine details of body movements in flying—
To Bob Tucker; to Vernell Coriell; to Jacqueline Lichtenberg; to my patient children; and to the dozens of workhands, rigging men, and performers who—not knowing that I was doing research for a book—put up with my questions and indulged my impertinent curiosity—
My sincerest thanks.
THE FLYING SANTELLIS
Names in uppercase letters are those of flyers with the Santelli troupe
BOOK ONE - The Flyer (1944-1947)
The full terror and the full reward of this fantastic game are given only to those who bring to it talent honed by obsessive practice into great skill, a fiercely competitive will, and high intelligence, with the flagellating sensitivity which so often accompanies it. In these men a terrible and profound change sometimes takes place; the game becomes life. They understand what Karl Wallenda meant when he said, going back to the high wire after the tragic fall that killed two of his troupe and left another a paraplegic, “To be on the wire is life; all the rest is waiting.”
—Sterling Moss/Ken Purdy
CHAPTER 1
In later life, when Tommy Zane was asked about his earliest memory, he never had any doubt. It was the time when they burned the Big Top at the Lambeth Circus.
Lambeth wasn’t the Greatest Show on Earth, not by a long shot. For all he knew, it might have been the smallest of the traveling circuses, playing mostly in villages and county seats through the Midwest. Tommy had only the haziest memory of seeing the show under the Big Top, when he was so small that he was never allowed into the ring at all, even at rehearsal, for fear someone would step on him.
He learned years later that it was halfway through the 1935 season when the main top had gotten so ancient and threadbare that it couldn’t even be fireproofed again, and Jim Lambeth had decided it was too dangerous, and made a bonfire of it so
mewhere in Oklahoma. It was grand publicity for the show, in those Depression days when admission was a quarter and it was hard enough for the poor farmers in that area to scrape it up, but Tommy only remembered being hoisted on his father’s shoulders while they watched it burn, flames shooting up forty feet into the air. He remembered that when it died down he had begun to cry, and when they asked him why he couldn’t tell them. His father said, “Overexcited, that’s all,” and carried him to bed in their family trailer. That had been early in the evening; later that night when he woke up and heard the familiar band music and Big Jim Lambeth’s voice booming out as usual over the band, the tight knot in his chest had dissolved. He had fallen asleep happy, knowing the circus would go on as usual. Seeing the Big Top burn, he had thought the show would be gone, too.
He had been five years old that summer. After that, they played under the open sky, on fairgrounds, stadiums, parks, and vacant lots outside the towns. The winters never seemed quite real. All through childhood he had a recurring fantasy, that when the show packed up in the fall they turned off the real world and lived like the animals in the zoo, caged in one place till the time came to go out on the road and live their real life again. He sometimes wondered if they turned off the audience, too, for the winter.
He never knew quite when he stopped thinking that way. It was late in the war, and he was fourteen years old, when he began to understand that to the people outside, it was his world that was the illusion, the fake, not quite genuine.
Tommy stood in the dirt and sawdust of the ring, watching the glint of the sun on the high rigging, waiting for the Santellis to finish their morning practice.
Forty feet above him, in the maze of guy wires and swinging trapezes, the three Santellis—Angelo, the catcher, and Mario and Papa Tony, the flyers—were busy at their morning workout. Tommy waited until Mario alighted on the platform at the near end.
“I went to town for the mail with Dad. Got a letter for you.”
“What’s the postmark?” Mario yelled down.
Tommy pulled the letter out of his pocket and studied the smudges. “San Francisco.”
“Okay, bring it up, then.”
Tommy kicked off his dusty tennis shoes and swarmed up the ladder like a monkey. That summer he was a short, sturdy kid, lithe and compact, with shoulders surprisingly broad for his height. He maneuvered around the bulge where the narrow rope ladder curved around the tight-strung safety net, and came up to the firmly guyed piece of board, wide enough for two or three people to stand abreast—the takeoff platform for the flyers.
Mario Santelli (Tommy always thought of him as Mario Santelli, though he had known for months that it was not his real name), standing with one arm around a guy rope, mopped at his sweaty forehead with a resin-soaked handkerchief. He took the letter and said, “Sit down. Maybe you can take it right down with you when you go.”
At the far end of the rigging, Angelo, the catcher—a short, thickset man in his mid-thirties with curly dark hair—had pulled himself upright and was sitting in the trapeze with one arm loosely braced around the rope, swinging gently to and fro.
“What’s the holdup?”
“Letter from Liss,” Mario called back, and tore the envelope open. While Mario read the letter, Tommy looked down at the whole panorama of the circus lot spread out below him, the backyard which was the same whether they set it up in Texas or Tennessee, Oklahoma or Ohio. In the dusty Texas sunlight, the clusters of house trailers where the performers lived looked like a small town, isolated from the wider roofs of the town beyond. In back of most of the trailers, wet wash was fluttering and flapping. Thick power cables coiled like snakes everywhere around the lot, running toward the generator truck.
The concession stands were going up, forming an alley to funnel the crowds inside. Behind roped-off barriers to keep away curious outsiders, the performing animals were staked in an enclosure formed by the parked rigging trucks and equipment trailers. Down by the cages where the cats were kept between shows, Tommy saw a foreshortened wedge of red shirt and broad-brimmed hat: his father, making sure that none of the females were in heat, none of the males had a sore pad or swollen tooth.
Directly below them in the ring, a group of acrobats were practicing; Tommy could hear Margot Clane counting for them, “One-two, one-two, allez-hop!” Other riggings were going up—for the wirewalker, Shuffles Small, and for the aerial ballet called the Pink Ladies. Beyond them the town roofs were spread out, hazy in the smoke from the cotton gin. An alien world, one Tommy knew nothing about.
Papa Tony—Antonio Santelli, small, wiry, gray-haired and gray-mustached—was resting with one leg thrown over the platform. “Any news?” he asked.
Mario finished reading his letter, folded it, and tucked it into the waistband of his tights. “None worth telling. I think she’s lonely. But it won’t be long—we’ll be breaking up in another week.”
“And time enough for that, I say,” Papa Tony declared. “It is too cold for the night shows; does the padrone want us to fly in our long red flannels?”
“And last night the wind was so bad I had all kinds of trouble controlling the ropes,” Mario said. He was a thin, tautly built young man in his early twenties, though he looked younger. His thick black curls were combed back from a high forehead, and his dark eyes under slanting brows gave his face a faintly foreign, faintly devilish air. You had to know him a long time before you found out that his eyebrows told a whacking lie about his face. Some people never found it out at all. “Any other mail, Tom?”
“Not for you, no. But I got a card—I wanted to tell you about it. Remember I went to school in San Angelo last year while Dad was working in the zoo there? A couple of kids I know there, Jeff Marlin and his sister Nancy—Jeff and I shared a locker in school. He says he and Nancy will come to the show Thursday and they’re coming early to say hello.”
“That will be nice for you, to see your friends,” Papa Tony said, “but this is Thursday; will they be here?” At Tommy’s nod, Papa Tony turned to Mario. “Matt, did you tell him?”
“No, I clean forgot. Tommy, we asked Big Jim to come down some morning this week before we break up for the winter. So keep your knees tucked in and don’t get butter-fingered.”
Tommy gulped but tried to pretend the sun was in his eyes. “Hey, does that mean—”
“It doesn’t mean a darn thing except he’s getting curious to see if I’ve been wasting my time all summer,” Mario cautioned. “Don’t you get in a hurry. I told you that, often enough. When you get a little steadier, we might let you fill in once in a while. But you hold on, don’t try to go too fast. I said—”
“Hey, Mario! I’m waiting,” Angelo shouted from the far end of the rigging. Mario rose to his feet in one smooth, fluid motion. The platform swayed like the deck of a ship, but all three automatically shifted their weight to compensate for it, not noticing. “Stick around, Tom—climb up out of the way. After we finish the routine, I want to try something. Coming, Angelo!”
“About time,” Angelo called back, then lowered himself to catching position, head down.
Tommy climbed up to the high bar fixed above the platform, to which the second trapeze was anchored when not in use. Here he could sit and watch without getting in the way of the flyers; it was his favorite vantage point, the spot he loved best. Only for a couple of months had he been privileged to sit up here when the Santellis were rehearsing. It wasn’t the view he cared about—though that was spectacular enough. What meant more to him was the proof that they trusted him up here: trusted him not to get in their way when they were rehearsing, not to distract one of them at a crucial moment, not to endanger them by doing something foolish. For a while this had been enough—but now he had something new to think about.
We might let you fill in once in a while . . . .
But don’t you get in a hurry. He wondered how many times this year Mario had said those words to him.
The Flying Santellis had joined the Lambeth Circus e
arlier that same year, halfway through June of 1944. As he watched Mario swing out toward Angelo, Tommy found himself remembering the first time he had watched them. Several months ago. They had arrived in the night; early in the morning they had set up their rigging and gone up to test it.
They were good. After a lifetime with the circus Tommy knew the difference between good, average, and incompetent performers, and the Santellis were good—good enough that he wondered, a little, what they were doing with a show the size of Lambeth.
Tommy had known immediately how good they were by the precise deftness with which the catcher waited to get the feel of the wind and the proper pacing before lowering himself to swing by his knees, testing the swing of the bar and speeding it up slightly by arching his shoulders, then twisting his legs around the side ropes of his trapeze, making himself an extension of the swing. Then the first of the flyers, a neat thin little old man with gray hair, reached up for the flying bar, gripped it in his hands, and swung out in a long, smooth arc. At the top of the swing he jackknifed his body upward, rolled over into a double back somersault that looked effortless, and straightened out smoothly, outstretched hands interlocking with the catcher’s grip.
Meanwhile the second flyer, a long-legged youngster in tights, had caught the returning trapeze on the backswing and swung out, throwing his body forward over the bar. Just as the first flyer let go of the catcher’s wrists, the boy let go of the trapeze and the two flyers somersaulted past one another, the boy landing safely in the catcher’s hands and the old man gripping the trapeze the boy had just released. Tommy caught his breath at the perfection of the maneuver—he had never seen a flying pass this close—but the old man, landing springily on the platform, had shouted, “Ragged, ragged! You break too fast, Mario! Try it again!”
They had done it three times more before the old man was satisfied. The old man caught up a towel, flung it about his shoulders, and sat down on the end of the platform to rest. Tommy, the spell broken, had turned to move away, when the younger flyer called out, “Hold it, Angelo. Give me a good high swing. I want to try again, okay?”
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