CHAPTER 5
The bus station in Los Angeles was crowded with winter travelers. Tommy moved through the crowds uncertainly, heavy suitcase in hand, looking into strange faces. He was used to a different kind of crowd, the noisy casual crowds on the midway; this big-city crowd frightened him a little. In the mirror surface of a glass door he caught a glimpse of himself, foreshortened by distance, a short thin boy with a mop of red curls, rumpled, untidy, and it seemed to him, in his state of fatigue and confusion, that the mirrored face looked frightened.
“Tommy? Over here.” Without any formal greeting, Mario came and picked up Tommy’s suitcase, then headed toward the door. “My car’s out front. Been waiting here long? I had to find a place to park.”
“No, just a minute or two.”
“You look awfully tired. That’s a hell of a trip by bus. How come your father didn’t send you by train?”
“Trains are too crowded. Anyway, he couldn’t get a what-you-call-it, a priority.”
“Had breakfast?”
“We stopped for breakfast a couple of hours ago, but I didn’t feel like eating.”
“Then we’ll stop somewhere before we get to the house. New Year’s Day is a madhouse, so there won’t be anything to eat before late afternoon—there never is. Lucia—that’s my mother—was going to come and meet you, but she had a million things to do, and anyway she doesn’t know you and you don’t know her, and I had to come past here anyway on the way out to the house. I haven’t been out to the place in a couple of weeks, but I called up last night and they said you were going to be on this bus, so I said I’d pick you up. Here, let’s put your suitcase in back.”
He stowed Tommy’s suitcase in the back seat of a battered blue Chrysler, about ten years old. The window glass was cracked on one side, and the front seat’s upholstery was gaping, but a tartan lap robe was tucked over the worst of it. Mario opened the door on the driver’s side.
“Slide in under the wheel, that door doesn’t open. Handle’s busted.” He got in himself behind Tommy and slammed the door.
Tommy said, mostly to have something to say, “I didn’t know you could drive.”
“Have to, out here. Everything’s so far from everything else, and the buses only run every three days or something like that. I don’t drive a lot on the road—Angelo doesn’t like the way I handle a car, says I drive like a homicidal maniac. I picked this one up cheap last fall, mostly to have something to go back and forth to work in.” He turned in at a low curbing. “Let’s get you some breakfast. I haven’t had anything, either.”
He walked easily along the sidewalk, leading the way into the cramped, steamy interior of a coffee shop. They sat in a booth with padded leather seats.
“How is Papa Tony?” Tommy inquired politely.
“Same as always—status quo—the nations tremble when he lifts his head, or however it goes. I haven’t been out to the house for a couple of weeks, but I’d have heard if anybody was sick.”
“You don’t live with the family?” Tommy found he was oddly disappointed.
“Well, I do and I don’t,” Mario said slowly. “It’s sort of a family tradition. From the time the tour breaks up, till New Year’s Day, everybody goes where they want to, does anything they feel like or can afford. Angelo’s down in Mexico with some kind of circus there. I wrote you about my job in the ballet school.” He broke off as a thin dark boy in a white jacket set down thick white mugs of coffee on the tabletop. “Thanks, Ronnie. Bring us along some eggs and some of that sausage, will you—that okay with you, Tom?”
“Sure, anything.”
Ronnie scribbled on a pad of counter checks. “Coming right up. Out early today, aren’t you, Matt?”
“Starting the New Year right,” Mario said with his most satanic grin. “Keno been in yet this morning?”
“He came in for coffee and ran right out again,” the boy said.
As Ronnie moved away toward the kitchen, Mario picked up one cup of coffee. “Sugar? Cream? Drink up, you look half frozen.”
“I thought California was warm.”
“Well, it is, compared to Chicago or places like that. But it gets cold nights. Anyway, like I was telling you, it’s a family tradition that on New Year’s Day, or around then, everybody who’s going on tour this season turns up and starts work. Angelo’s going to be late this year—he’s down in Mexico with Tessa, his daughter.”
“I didn’t even know he was married.”
“He was married,” Mario corrected. “Teresa was killed in a highway accident last spring—just before we came out with Lambeth. It’s why we didn’t go out earlier, why we came over to Lambeth when they had an opening midseason. Tessa’s only four or five. She’s in a convent boarding school in Santa Barbara—up the coast a ways—but Angelo took her to Mexico with him. He’s managing an indoor circus down there, over the holidays. He wanted me to go along with him, but I like the job I’ve got, so he took along an act called the Flying Barrys.” He set down his coffee as the boy arrived with plates of eggs and sausage. “Thanks, Ronnie. You want anything else, Tom? Pancakes, doughnuts?”
“No, thanks, this is plenty.”
Ronnie paused a minute, then asked: “What goes, Matt?”
“Nothing special. I kind of figured I’d run into Keno here, but he must be out tomcatting around somewhere.” As the boy moved away, Mario explained to Tommy, “That kid is in one of my classes at the ballet school.”
“Do they call you Matt all the time, out here?” Tommy asked.
“Everybody outside the family.”
“How did you come to change it?”
“Like I said, there’s always been a Mario in the family. I never did fill you in on the family history, did I?”
“Just bits and pieces here and there.”
Mario glanced at his wristwatch, a wafer-thin one on a strap of woven leather; he followed Tommy’s glance and laughed. “On the road I wear a pocket watch like everybody else. This one was a present. I kind of like it, though Lucia has a fit when I wear it at the house. The guy who gave it to me probably didn’t realize that there are still people who think a wristwatch is”—he hesitated—“kind of sissy. Look, I’ll fill you in on the family while we eat. Don’t let your eggs get cold.”
Briefly, what Mario told him went like this: Early in the 1890s, Mario di Santalis and his sons Tito and Rico had come to America, survivors of an Italian-Austrian family of acrobats and jugglers known to European circuses for a hundred years. They had toured America with half a dozen circuses and briefly, before World War I, managed their own. Mario’s son Antonio, our own “Papa Tony,” married the daughter of another circus family, Carla Fortunati. Di Santalis proved too much for American ringmasters to pronounce, so they became the Santelli Brothers and then, when Antonio pioneered one of the first flying-return acts on the then-new flying trapezes, the Flying Santellis. After Rico’s retirement Antonio had toured with his sons, Joe and Angelo, and his daughter, Lucia.
“Matt Gardner—my father—joined the act as a catcher,” Mario said. “Lucia was the star of the show then, and a real beauty. They got married, and she was too busy for a while having us kids to do much flying. There are four of us: Liss, my sister, is the oldest, then me, then Johnny and Mark—they’re twins. My father died when the twins were just babies. None of us can remember him, not even Liss.”
“Was he—was he killed in a fall?”
“No. He died of typhoid during a long stand in Pittsburgh. After he died, Lucia went back on the road, until the accident.” Abruptly he pushed his cold coffee away. “Come on, it’s time to be on our way to the house, I guess.”
Mario guided the car through the jammed downtown traffic and turned off on a broad winding parkway lined with unfamiliar shrubbery, green grass, and leaves. It seemed warm now to Tommy; he pulled off his sweater, and Mario laughed.
“Wait till you get used to it. Our climate always seems warm to newcomers, but when you’ve been here a couple of wint
ers you’ll be shivering when it drops down to sixty, too.” He drove dangerously, taking the corners fast. Tommy found himself filled with a dozen more questions. Were Mario’s brothers also flyers? How many were there in the family all together? But before Mario’s closed face he discovered he didn’t want to ask any of them.
Abruptly Mario slowed the car again and glanced at Tommy. “Did your father tell you anything about Johnny?”
“About who? No, nothing.”
“Before we get to the house,” Mario said, “I guess I better tell you why you’re really here.” He kept his eyes on the street. “I want you to get this so you won’t say the wrong thing at the wrong time. Here’s what happened. You know Lambeth liked those four-man two-trapeze duo routines we did. To be truthful, Lucky, I thought you were too young and I said so. I wanted you to spend another year just filling in now and then, not on a regular basis. Angelo and Papa Tony know everybody in the business, of course; they could have found us a dozen men just like that, but we usually don’t work with anyone outside the family. It’s sort of a family tradition,” Mario repeated. “So naturally we thought about my brother, Johnny. He toured with us before we came to Lambeth—in fact, at first I was second catcher, with Angelo, and Johnny and Liss were the flyers. Johnny was no great shakes as a flyer, but he was a very good catcher. In fact, when he was good he was very, very good, and when he was bad, like the nursery rhyme says, he was impossible. He and Papa Tony had a row, and Papa Tony told him he wasn’t fit to call himself a Santelli, and Johnny said okay, that was fine by him, he wasn’t ashamed of being a Gardner. Which, as you can imagine, wasn’t calculated to soothe the savage breast, especially not Papa Tony’s.”
Tommy blinked, trying to imagine anyone talking back to Papa Tony. Mario, following his thoughts accurately, laughed a little.
“Well, Papa Tony grounded him—refused to let him fly—and Johnny refused to go back to being spare man and errand boy, threw over the act, and went off and got a job with a carnival. Than which, according to Papa Tony, there’s nothing lower on the face of the earth. Before he left he damned all the Santellis, past, present, and future, and none of us heard a word from him all the time we were with Lambeth. I guess he sent Lucia a card now and then just to tell her he was still alive, not in the Army or anything.
“Well. Early this fall, we saw a write-up in Billboard about Freres and Stratton Shows, about a midway flying act, and there he was in the middle of it, large as life. So a few weeks ago, when we decided we needed a fourth man, Lucia suggested Johnny, and Angelo suddenly spoke up loud and clear, and said if Johnny came back he was leaving.
“I wish you could have heard him. You know how quiet Angelo is. He never raised his voice, didn’t get mad, just sat there dropping ashes all over Lucia’s rug and said if we took Johnny back into the act he was quitting, and that was all there was to it. He said, ‘That Zane kid. He may not be brilliant like Johnny, but from the first time Matt let him up on the rigging, he was all business.’ Angelo said, ‘He makes mistakes, sure, but we can trust him not to pull some damn fool stunt just for the fun of it. Also,’ Angelo said, ‘that kid’s got some respect. He’s not a smart-aleck, and he doesn’t talk back and argue all the whole damn time.’
“Well, you know, that was it. It really was. Papa Tony acts like he owns us all body and soul, and I make noises like a prima donna from time to time, but it’s Angelo who keeps this show on the road, and don’t you ever forget it, kid.”
“Angelo said that? About me?” Tommy would have been willing to swear under oath that Angelo had never paid the slightest attention to him.
“That’s what he said. I’m not saying all this to give you a swelled head or anything. You got everything to learn yet, you got to work like hell this winter if you’re going on tour this summer with us, but—”
“I know that—” But Tommy was stunned. Angelo liked him, then. It was Angelo who had spoken up for him!
“Good. But this is the thing, kid. Johnny was great when he put his mind to it, but then he’d get some wild idea, try out new tricks without warning people what he was going to do, try some stunt in front of the audience without clearing it first with the rest of us. Oh, they’d come off, all right—he’s got the devil’s own luck—but you just couldn’t tell him anything. He wouldn’t take orders. He wouldn’t turn out and practice. He said he was better without practicing than the rest of us were with it, and the hell of it is, he was right He is good. He’s a goddamn genius. But that kind of attitude just doesn’t go down in the family. He wouldn’t do his share of the donkey work. And he talked back all the time—to Angelo, to Papa Tony. Lots of times he wound up doing what they said, but he always wanted them to tell him just why he had to do something or other, and you know the way Papa Tony is, and Angelo, too. They want to say, ‘Do something,’ and you do it and no questions asked. And on the road, that’s the only way to run an act. We all got sick of Johnny arguing any time anybody told him to do anything. So Angelo was a lot easier to live with after Johnny quit, and when Papa Tony started talking about taking him back, like I said, Angelo threw a fit So we decided to give you a chance instead. For all we knew, Johnny would have told us all to go to hell anyhow. And here you are, and that’s that.” Mario drew a deep breath as he applied the brakes and swung the car onto a wide gravel driveway.
CHAPTER 6
The car turned in through a wide iron gateway, the gate open and slightly askew on the hinges.
“There it is. Regular old monster of a place, isn’t it?”
At the far end of the gravel drive, the house was just a dark, looming building, but Tommy got a random impression of bay windows and turrets and wings jutting out in all directions.
“It’s a monstrosity,” Mario said candidly. “Papa Tony and my father bought it cheap back in the silent-movie days—during the Depression. This place went for taxes when the star who owned it committed suicide or something. They tore the old ballroom to pieces and set up the flying rig in it. For about six years, back then, this was winter quarters for eight or ten flying acts. But no one uses it now except the family.” He got out of the car, taking Tommy’s suitcase. “Papa Tony talks, now and then, about putting it up for sale and buying a smaller place. There are a lot of us, it’s a big family, but not big enough for a place like this. But you can’t sell oversized dumps like this anymore. You can just hardly manage to give them away.”
Three other cars were parked in the wide driveway: the gray Ford sedan the Santellis used on the road, an oversized black Hudson, and a small, sun-faded MG sports car, spattered thickly with red mud and clay on wheels and fenders.
“Liss and David must have a new car,” Mario said, frowning. “That isn’t California mud, though. Minnesota plates? I wonder who that belongs to . . .” He flung the door open. “Come on in, Tom.”
To that first glance the hall was dark and enormous, lighted by an old-fashioned chandelier that threw down more shadows than lights. Some jackets and sweaters and children’s overshoes were flung on a cedar chest. Underfoot the carpet was faded, scuffed, threadbare. There was a delightful aroma of coffee and spices, which Mario sniffed appreciatively.
“Smells like Lucia’s getting all ready for the New Year, all right.” He set Tommy’s suitcase down, and as if that had been a signal, Papa Tony appeared at the end of the hall. “Is it you, Matt? And did you meet—yes, I see. Tommy, glad to see you.” He came down the hall, moving noiselessly in carpet slippers, and extended his hand. The sleeves of his blue chambray shirt were rolled back, showing the knotty, sun-tanned sinews in his forearms. His heavy gray hair was carefully combed back from his low forehead, but the gray eyebrows sprang out, unruly, emphasizing his scowl. Tommy felt that the sharp dark eyes, making one brisk trip from his head to his feet and back, saw and recorded everything about him, including the loose button on his sweater and the scuff marks on his shoes.
“How is your father, Tommy?”
“Very well, thank you, sir.”
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br /> “Matt. Where are we to put him?”
“In Johnny’s room, I thought.”
“No. Johnny is here.” He spoke the name with an inflection that made it sound more like Gianni. “Didn’t you see his car in the drive? And he has brought a partner with him, a young woman. Some place must be found for her as well. Well, Lucia must contrive something.” He gave Tommy a brusque nod, evidently meant to be kind. “Make yourself at home, my boy.”
Mario threw a door open at the right of the hallway, into a large, long, high-ceilinged room. Thick, sun-faded draperies were pushed back from bay windows on two sides, and an open fire was burning in an enormous fireplace. Around the fire, their backs to Tommy and Mario, what seemed like a large number of men, women, and children were gathered, some in high-backed leather chairs, a few on battered leather hassocks, and a girl around Tommy’s age with a younger boy on the floor. At the very center of the group a handsome blond youth in a blue sweater was standing, gesturing humorously, and Tommy heard him saying:
“. . . so I told old Frenzel what he could do with his orders, and didn’t wait around to see whether he did it or not. That night while they were tearing down the sidewalls I sneaked around behind the line of trucks and I told the prop boss just what the deal was—and I gave him a choice. He could give Stella her father’s equipment and rigging without making a fuss, or I’d give him—”
A short, dark woman got up from a chair and came quickly over to them. She stood on tiptoe, taking Tommy’s shoulders between her hands. She studied him gravely for a minute, then smiled. “So this is Tommy,” she said. “My son has talked about you a good deal. Matt, I didn’t hear you come in.”
“Who could, with Johnny holding center ring?” Mario laughed softly. “Tommy, this is my mother, Lucia Gardner. Lucia, where are we going to put him? My old room?”
The Catch Trap Page 8
